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This Publication

The Strategic Lessons Unlearned from Vietnam,

Iraq, and Afghanistan:

Why the Afghan National Security Forces Will Not Hold, and the Implications for the

U.S. Army in Afghanistan

The Strategic Lessons Unlearned from Vietnam,

Iraq, and Afghanistan:

Why the Afghan National Security Forces Will Not Hold, and the Implications for the

U.S. Army in Afghanistan

M. Chris MasonM. Chris Mason

M. Chris M

asonThe Strategic Lessons Unlearned from

Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan:

Why the Afghan National Security Forces W

ill Not Hold, and the Implications

for the U.S. Army in Afghanistan

The Strategic Lessons Unlearned from Vietnam

, Iraq, and Afghanistan:W

hy the Afghan National Security Forces Will Not Hold, and the Im

plicationsfor the U.S. Arm

y in Afghanistan

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Strategic Studies Instituteand

U.S. Army War College Press

THE STRATEGIC LESSONS UNLEARNED FROM VIETNAM, IRAQ,

AND AFGHANISTAN:

Why the Afghan National Security Forces Will Not Hold, and the Implications for the U.S.

Army in Afghanistan

M. Chris Mason

June 2015

The views expressed in this report are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government. Authors of Strategic Studies Institute (SSI) and U.S. Army War College (USAWC) Press publications enjoy full academic freedom, provided they do not disclose classified information, jeopardize operations security, or misrepresent official U.S. policy. Such academic freedom empowers them to offer new and sometimes controversial perspectives in the inter-est of furthering debate on key issues. This report is cleared for public release; distribution is unlimited.

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CONTENTS

Foreword ……………………………………….........viiAbout the Author.........................................................ixIntroduction ……………………...................................1

Part I: Why the Afghan National Security Forces Cannot Hold, and the Implications for the U.S. Army in Afghanistan ..................................… 5 Summary ………………………………………........…5Relative Geographical and Force Sizes …..………..11Comparison of the Ground Forces ….…………......16Comparison of the Air Forces ……………….......…21Comparison of the Paramilitary Police Forces........26 Comparison of the Irregular Forces ….................…41Strategic Impact of Irregulars …………………....... 48Military Conclusions Regarding Comparable Force Sizes ..........................................50Close Air Support: The Sine Qua Non of Afghan National Security Forces Survival .......... 52The Unending Civil War …………………............... 57Attrition: The Force Killer …………….................… 69The Ethnic Time Bomb ……………………….......…77The Elephant in the Room …………………….........85Countervailing Arguments ……...........................…88

Part II. Afghanistan Year-by-Year 2015-19..........129 Motivation: Why the Afghan National Army will Collapse in the South ……....................129Where Does Motivation Come From? The Critical Legitimacy Factor …........................... 140The Fallacy of “Nation-Building”.……….............. 147

The Future of Afghanistan by Year from 2015 to 2019.................................................... 156

Part III. The Strategic Lessons Unlearned from Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan ……….. 175

Impediments to Strategic Judgment ….................. 175Guidelines for Future Wars …………..............…...186Conclusions ……………………………................... 190

Appendix I: Central Intelligence Agency Guide to the Analysis of Insurgency …………..211

Appendix II: Relative Combat Power: Wargaming Beyond One-to-One ……….........…219

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FOREWORD

Military personnel who have experience in Af-ghanistan, Iraq, or Vietnam, as well as senior leaders and military historians alike, will find this book by Dr. Chris Mason thought-provoking and useful. Dr. Mason examines indigenous personnel issues at the tactical, operational, and strategic levels of war and uses empirical data and exhaustive research to argue that all three wars were lost before the first shots were fired—not on the battlefield, but at the strategic level of war.

The United States interpreted all three conflicts as insurgencies, Mason writes, when in fact all three were civil wars in which the United States took a side. Suc-cess was never possible from the outset, his provoca-tive thesis argues, because none of the three countries were nations for which the majority of their citizens were willing to fight and die. Nation-building is a slow, evolutionary, internal process through which the political identity of the peoples within a country’s borders matures over centuries to transcend tribalism, secularism, and ethnic divides, Mason argues, until it reaches a pervasive sense of nationhood. “Nation-building,” and democracy-importation on the point of foreign bayonets, this book maintains, is impossible.

Throughout this book, Mason continually exam-ines the issues from new perspectives and introduces new tactical, operational, and strategic paradigms. His explication in Part II of what will happen in Af-ghanistan year-by-year from 2015 to 2019 unless major changes occur in theater is bold, captivating, stark—and credible. The contributions to operational wargaming in Afghanistan in Appendix II alone make this publication a must-read. His comparative statis-

tical and qualitative analyses of the Afghan National Security Forces today, and those in Vietnam and Iraq at their respective points of collapse, are no less eye-opening and thought provoking. His examination of the bureaucratic and psychological obstacles to poli-cymaking and objective strategic analysis in Part III should be absorbed by every military officer in the United States.

In short, this is a provocative, highly readable, and wide-ranging analysis of the future of Afghanistan and the future of land warfare. Not everyone will like or agree with his conclusions, but they are a valuable contribution to understanding the conflicts in Viet-nam, Iraq, and Afghanistan—and those the U.S. Army may fight in the future—in an important new way.

DOUGLAS C. LOVELACE, JR. Director Strategic Studies Institute and U.S. Army War College Press

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

M. CHRIS MASON joined the faculty at the Strategic Studies Institute as a Professor of National Security Affairs in June 2014. He has worked in and on Af-ghanistan for the past 15 years. Dr. Mason retired from the Foreign Service in 2005 and worked as the South Asia desk officer for the Marine Corps’ Center for Ad-vanced Operational Culture and Language for several years, where he wrote the Marine Corps deployer’s guide to Afghan culture and the guide to Operational Pashtunwali. He has deployed to and traveled to Af-ghanistan and Pakistan numerous times, beginning in December 2001, serving as the political officer on the Provincial Reconstruction Team in Paktika in 2005. Dr. Mason authored the first paper in the U.S. Gov-ernment on the Afghan National Army (ANA) in Oc-tober 2001, and worked for 5 years on ANA, Afghan National Police and other security issues as the rep-resentative of the Bureau of Political Military Affairs to the Afghan Interagency Operations Group. From 1981 to 1986, he served as a regular U.S. Navy Officer on active duty, including tours as the Gunnery Offi-cer on the USS John Young (DD973) and a Naval Gun-fire Liaison Officer with 2d Battalion 12th Marines in Okinawa, Japan, and 2d Air Naval Gunfire Liaison Company (ANGLICO [Airborne]) at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. Dr. Mason was a Peace Corps Vol-unteer in rural development in South America from 1977 to 1979. Dr. Mason trained tens of thousands of deploying American and North Atlantic Treaty Orga-nization military personnel on military and cultural aspects of the war in Afghanistan, and has published widely on Afghanistan and Pakistan in numerous publications over the past 10 years. Dr. Mason holds

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a bachelor’s degree with Honors from Carnegie Mel-lon University; graduated with Distinction from the resident Command and General Staff College course at the Marine Corps University, Quantico, VA; holds a masters degree in military studies from the Ma-rine Corps University, and a Ph.D. in military and Central Asian history from The George Washington University, Washington, DC.

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INTRODUCTION

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

George Santayana1

Anyone wanting to commit American ground forc-es to the mainland of Asia should have his head examined.

Douglas MacArthur, 19612

Any future defense secretary who advises the presi-dent to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should have his head examined.

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, 20113

The wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan were all fought after General Douglas MacArthur’s admo-nition in 1961 to President John Kennedy not to com-mit land forces to a war in Asia. Three times in 40 years, the United States committed large numbers of U.S. ground forces to land wars in Asia anyway and lost all three of them, not on the battlefield, but at the strategic level of war. As of December 2014, 65,069 Americans have died in those wars. So far, no one has had their head examined. This book seeks to conduct that examination on a national strategic level, and to lay out for senior military leaders the explicit les-sons of Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan that remain unlearned and which would have prevented every single one of those deaths.

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This book is written in three parts. It builds from the tactical to the operational to the strategic level of war. The purpose of Part I is to explain why the securi-ty forces of Afghanistan cannot hold back the Taliban in the southern half of the country based on analysis using comparisons with the military and political situ-ations at the time of the U.S. withdrawals from Viet-nam and Iraq. Part II will examine, at the operational level of war, what will happen in Afghanistan year-by-year over the next 5 years (from 2015 to 2019), the concept of “nation-building,” and the resulting opera-tional lessons from the wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Af-ghanistan. Part III synthesizes Parts I and II, examines obstacles to strategic judgment when faced with this kind of information, and provides a strategic guide for evaluating all international military engagements from the point of view of land warfare. These strategic lessons from Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan should form the foundation of consideration and strategic thought for all future potential land warfare.

From the American perspective, all three conflicts were counterinsurgencies, but this is not a book about counterinsurgency, or to what extent the future Army should train and be equipped for counterinsurgency, or even if counterinsurgency doctrine itself is sound. Counterinsurgency works if the people living inside the insurgency want it to work, and it fails if they do not. Foreigners can build architecture, but they cannot build a nation. Extensive empirical data shows con-clusively that there was no increase in local commu-nity support for the Afghan government, for example, after the delivery of schools, roads, clinics, and so on, by the counterinsurgents.4 We built it, and they did not come. Furthermore, this data was available be-fore the tactic of “clear, hold, and build” was widely implemented at enormous cost in blood and treasure.

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The intent of this book is not to criticize at any level the military participants in these conflicts. With rare exceptions, the U.S. military fought honorably and ca-pably in all three conflicts and achieved outcomes in each case that were, in grand strategic terms, about the best that could have been achieved. No disrespect to the men and women who went overseas and did the best jobs they could in complex environments un-der difficult conditions should be inferred in the pages that follow. There are no counterhistorical arguments about how these conflicts might have been better con-ducted with different tactics, operations, and strate-gies, if indeed there were any strategies, or any hypo-thetical alternative outcomes.

There are also neither impracticable “recommenda-tions” for how to fix Afghanistan with the vague, and grandiose “musts” and “shoulds” that usually accom-pany analyses of this type, nor any trivial rearrang-ing of deck chairs such as twiddling on the margins of force size and so on. Americans are a practical people restlessly in search of solutions, but some problems have no solutions, and Afghanistan is one of them. There are no silver bullets, and anything that could help salvage the situation is politically impossible. American officers are trained to find a way to win, but sometimes forces beyond the battlefield make nega-tive outcomes inevitable. Instead, the intent of this book is to break up the ice of conventional thinking, which has calcified the discussion of these issues into such predictable patterns, and to demonstrate that the outcomes in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan were, in fact, predetermined by immutable political and cul-tural imperatives before the first shots were fired. This book will show that these tragedies were avoidable, and will define these immutable political and cultural

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imperatives as strategic litmus tests for the security policy apparatus of the United States. They are espe-cially critical to the Joint Chiefs of Staff as part of their processes for determining when, where, and how to engage U.S. military power.

ENDNOTES - INTRODUCTION

1. George Santayana, “The Life of Reason, or the Phases of Human Progress,” Vol. I, Reason in Common Sense, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1920, p. 284.

2. James Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters, New York: Simon and Schuster, 2008, p. 102.

3. “Gates’s Warning: Avoid Land War in Asia, Middle East, and Africa,” The Christian Science Monitor, February 26, 2011, available from www.csmonitor.com/USA/Military/2011/0226/Gates-s-warning-Avoid-land-war-in-Asia-Middle-East-and-Africa.

4. Dr. Jennifer Brick, “The Political Economy of Custom-ary Village Organizations in Rural Afghanistan,” Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2008.

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PART I:

WHY THE AFGHAN NATIONAL SECURITY FORCES CANNOT HOLD, AND THE

IMPLICATIONS FOR THE U.S. ARMY IN AFGHANISTAN

SUMMARY

All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident. Arthur Schopenhauer1

A new paper, article, or book seemingly appears almost daily about the future of Afghanistan, gen-erally ruminating on “ifs” and “unknowns” before concluding that the outcome remains “uncertain.” In fact, the outcome in Afghanistan and the events of the next 5 years are not difficult to foresee, and there is not really any realistic doubt about this outcome. Ev-erything else is whistling past the strategic graveyard and magical thinking.2 The conclusions drawn here are entirely in accord with the consensus of the U.S. intelligence community, as set out in the unclassified portions of a series of National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs) released to the public.3 Indeed, this book is de-rived entirely from unclassified and publicly available documents and information sources, together with the author’s interviews and conversations in unclassified public fora. Readers should bear in mind that the most pessimistic and negative information, such as district-by-district intelligence assessments of Taliban control in Afghanistan, are classified, and this book contains only information from the more optimistic sphere

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of public information. Nevertheless, some military readers of this book may still experience cognitive dissonance, so deeply has the ethos of optimism been ingrained in the culture of the military.

This is most often visible in the friction between the intelligence community and the military. The track record of intelligence assessments on Afghanistan being condemned by senior military leaders as be-ing “too pessimistic,” only to be proven to have been too optimistic, is a long one, but it has not changed the pattern.4 In the past, Central Command (CENT-COM) leaders even went to the extraordinary step of demanding a military rebuttal to the pessimistic con-clusions of Afghanistan NIEs.5 The overall pattern for almost a decade has been that the intelligence com-munity creates an NIE, the NIE is condemned by the military (which does not have a statutory role outside of the Defense Intelligence Agency in intelligence pro-duction and coordination), and the assessment proves to have been correct (or even understated).6 When the next NIE is produced, the process is repeated. Nor is this new. The exact same thing happened during the Vietnam War. Indeed, this is just another of the ex-traordinary number of parallels between the wars in Afghanistan and Vietnam.7 Sociologists and psycholo-gists refer to this as the “backfire effect,” or in clinical terms, the confirmation bias,8 which is the odd but hu-man tendency to interpret contradictory new evidence as confirmation of one’s existing beliefs rather than as a reason to change them. Part III of this book will briefly examine the confirmation bias, why the U.S. military establishment is so frequently at odds with the intelligence community, and why there remains a disturbing tendency to downplay the consensus of our best intelligence analysts in favor of more optimistic

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military projections of capabilities and future events to the overall detriment of national security policy.

Regarding the future of Afghanistan, in blunt terms, the United States has been down this road at the strategic level twice before, in Vietnam and Iraq, and there is no viable rationale for why the results will be any different in Afghanistan. South Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan are, or were, very different countries. Yet, at the strategic level of war, all three have critical commonalities, and these yield strategic lessons that remain unlearned. First and foremost, all three coun-tries were artificial colonial relics with no pervasive sense of national identity. South Vietnam was the bas-tard stepchild of colonial French Indochina, the result of an inept post-war French effort to regain its colonies in Southeast Asia with ill-considered and ill-advised U.S. financial and logistical support.9 Afghanistan was an unruly outlier of many empires when Central Asia was the heart of the world and cursed to be, in histo-rian Arnold Toynbee’s words, “the Eastern crossroads of history.”10 Its present cartographic form results from the desire to create a buffer of wilderness between the 18th and 19th century Russian and British empires.11 Whether this 19th century European construct should be preserved at the cost of thousands of lives simply for the sake of preserving it goes unasked.

Iraq is another colonial relic (or was, as there seems little realistic possibility of it being reestablished de facto within its 1922/2005 de jure boundaries), con-cocted in a British imperial “absence of mind.”12 Its borders were randomly drawn in straight lines across the old Ottoman Empire by Gertrude Bell in 1918 and affirmed by the Treaty of Mohammara in 1922.13 In-deed, imperial mapmakers like Bell created such lines all over Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia largely

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along geographical features or simply with a straight edge, with little regard for religious, tribal, linguistic, or ethnic realities on the ground. Slowly, these imperi-al maps are being redrawn from within, in places like Bangladesh, Sudan, Eritrea, East Timor, the former Yugoslavia, and Iraq, accompanied by bloodshed and stubbornly resisted as long as possible as a matter of principle by diplomats of the status quo at the United Nations (UN) and the State Department. The ques-tions of whether places like Iraq, Syria, and Pakistan are actually ever going to be viable as nations at all, and should even be single countries are never asked when discussions of using military force arise. For whatever reason, foreign policy, and therefore mili-tary policy, always proceeds from the unquestioned assumption that failed and failing countries should be kept together as countries at all costs, even though un-sustainable and unworkable borders usually lie at the core of their failure.

Second, all three conflicts were civil wars. This is another startling commonality of the wars in Viet-nam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. In words that echo of Iraq and Afghanistan, Vietnam historian Jeffrey Record notes:

By refusing to recognize or admit that the Vietnam War was from its inception primarily a civil war, and not part of a larger, centrally-directed international conspiracy, policymakers assumed that North Vietnam was, like the United States, waging a limited war, and therefore that it would be prepared to settle for something less than total victory (especially if confronted by military stalemate on the ground in the South and the threat of aerial bombard-ment of the North). In so making this assumption, poli-cymakers not only ignored two millennia of Vietnamese history, but also excused themselves from confronting the harsh truth that civil wars are, for their indigenous

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participants, total wars, and that no foreign participant in someone else’s civil war can possibly have as great a stake in the conflict’s outcome—and attendant willing-ness to sacrifice—as do the indigenous parties involved.14

Of the three countries under consideration in this book, South Vietnam came the closest to having a workable ethnic majority, but religious and socio-economic divides created insurmountable obstacles to national unity, and ultimately to a meaningful sense of nationhood. None of three had ever been a democ-racy or came close to developing the social values that underpin western democracy. In each case, the Unit-ed States attempted to impose one anyway. In each one, the U.S. Army (primarily) attempted to create a standing army in the exact model of the U.S. Army itself, which would be responsible for maintaining in power a U.S.-created system of government. All three of these governments were proclaimed “legitimate” based on the trappings of elections, despite elections having never been a source of legitimacy of gover-nance in any of them before. In each case, the enemies of the U.S.-created governments and their militaries were able to marshal, train, equip, and find sanctuary across a border with a territorial neighbor—Cambo-dia and North Vietnam in the case of South Vietnam, Syria in the case of Iraq, and Pakistan in the case of Afghanistan.

Thus at the strategic level, the military outcome in Afghanistan is not seriously in question, as there is no strategic basis for it to be different than the outcomes in South Vietnam and Iraq, no matter how much whistling past the strategic graveyard proceeds it. The Afghan National Army (ANA) and Afghan National Police (ANP) cannot maintain security in the southern

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part of the country after the departure of American forces: Indeed, they are not entirely doing so today. Even while American air power is still available and being applied robustly, at least five Afghan districts have no government presence, and many ANA garri-sons in the south and east are already surrounded like little Alamos. Many of these base-bound garrisons are struggling simply to obtain food and ammunition, and they rarely venture outside their perimeters. An hour’s drive from Kabul, in Tagab district of Kapisa Province, for example, the soldiers of the ANA garri-son are permitted by the Taliban to leave their base for 1 hour each day, to go to the bazaar to buy their food, as long as they carry no weapons.15 On December 2, 2014, with the help of an ANA defector from the post, the Taliban attacked the ANA outpost Bala Murghab district of Badghis Province16 almost within sight of the Turkmenistan border and killed the entire garrison of six soldiers.17 On November 29, 2014, the Taliban over-ran the ANA garrison in Sangin, Helmand Province, killing 14 ANA soldiers. Another six or seven soldiers were missing in action.18 The real government in these districts and many, many others today is the Taliban. Momentum is not on the side of the Afghan govern-ment, and there is no perceivable “game changer” on the horizon. Slow decay is inevitable, and state failure is a matter of time. Using the metrics in the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) unclassified “Guide to the Analysis of Insurgency”19 and publicly available sta-tistics, it is clear that Afghanistan is in the “final stages of a successful insurgency,” (see Appendix I).

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Map I-1. Afghanistan.

To assess first the inevitability of state security fail-ure in southern Afghanistan in strictly military terms, a brief summary of the comparative strengths of the security forces of South Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghani-stan will provide a useful point of departure.

RELATIVE GEOGRAPHICAL AND FORCE SIZES

South Vietnam: 67,108 square miles Population (1975): 19.6 million20 Paramilitary:21 Police, 102,000 Police Field Force, 20,200 Total Paramilitary Police: 122,200 Other Paramilitary Forces not reporting to the

Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN): People’s Self-Defense Force (PSDF),

1,000,00022 (after 1968) Revolutionary Development Cadre

(RDC), 54,500 (Including Son Thong RDC)

Provincial Reconnaissance Units, 6,000 Kit Carson Scouts, 2,916

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Armed Propaganda Teams, 5,550 Total Paramilitary Forces: 1,068,966 = 15.9

militia forces per square mile Military:23

Army: 710,000 regulars = 10.58 soldiers per square mile

Army: 510,000 Irregulars (Regional Forc-es and Provincial Forces, organized into 1,500 companies and 8,186 platoons24)

Navy: 57,000 (Including the 15,000 man Vietnamese Marine Corps)

Air Force: 63,000 Total Military Forces: 1,340,000 = 20 soldiers

per square mile

Security Force Total: 2,531,116 men, 37.71 per sq. mile, 129.14 per 1,000 citizens Percentage of Security Forces comprised by Para-military Police: 12.5.

Note: All Civilian Irregular Defense Groups (CIDG) were transferred into the Border Ranger Battalions of the ARVN in 1970.

Afghanistan: 251,827 square miles (Region-al Command [RC] South and RC Southwest: 77,869 square miles25) Population (2014): 28.3 million26

Paramilitary: Regular Police, 157,000 Irregular Police, 24,000 (Afghan local police or

ALP)27 Public Protection Force (Afghan Public Protec-

tion Force or APPF)28 20,000 Total Paramilitary Forces: 201,000 = 0.8 per

square mile

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Military: Army 156,000 regulars in 6 Corps = 0.62 soldiers per square mile29

(The ANA has no reserve or irregular forces asso-ciated with it.)

Security Force Total: 358,000 men, 1.4 per sq. mile 12.8 per 1,000 citizens Percentage of Security Forces comprised by Para-military Police: 56.

Note: The National Directorate of Security (NDS), the successor to the Soviet Khadamat-e Aetela’at-e Dawlati (KHAD) secret police, maintains armed security per-sonnel in each province, possibly totaling 5,000 to 7,000 fighters. The Army number includes the 6,000 men (and approximately 20 women) of the Afghan National Air Force.

Iraq: 169,234 square miles Population (2014): 34.8 million30 Police +/- 25,000: 1 policeman for every 6.8

square miles Army active duty: 283,000 men in 197 combat

battalions Army reserves: 528,500 men

Security Force Total: 836,500 men, 4.9 per sq. mile 24.0 per 1,000 citizens Percentage of Security Forces comprised by Para-military Police: 3.

Note: The 2014 Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) offensive struck with such rapidity that effectively none of the reserve forces were mobilized before the collapse of the Iraqi Army. Thus, it could be more ac-

14

curate to assess that there were 308,000 armed security providers, or 1.82 per square mile.

From this statistical comparison, it can be readily seen that of the three countries, in strictly numeri-cal terms, Afghanistan has by far the lowest ratios of armed government security providers per square mile of territory (1.4) and per 1,000 citizens (12.8), and, by an extreme margin, the highest percentage of the state security apparatus comprised of relatively combat-weak police forces (56 percent). The earlier edition of Field Manual (FM) 3-24/Marine Corps Warf-ighting Publications (MCWP) 3-33.5, Counterinsurgency, gave a force density recommendation of 25 security forces per 1,000 citizens, and stated that “20 counter-insurgents per 1,000 residents is often considered the minimum troop density required for effective counter-insurgency (COIN) operations.”31

These numbers were contentious and dropped from the new edition of the manual, and one won-ders if the rationale for deleting this formula was a result of South Vietnam having 129 security forces per 1,000 citizens, Iraq having 24 per 1,000 citizens, while Afghanistan has an embarrassingly low 12.8 security personnel per 1,000 citizens, more than half of whom are static and combat-weak police. Force size in counterinsurgency is a hotly debated topic, but until recently, statistical analysis was not available to back up any of the various theories and “rules of thumb.” In 2011, however, after an exhaustive empiri-cal study of more than 50 insurgencies using a variety of potential metrics (e.g., number of security forces per square mile, number of security forces per 1,000 population, number of security forces per insurgent, etc.) Jeffrey Friedman of Harvard’s Kennedy School concluded that:

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force size as measured by troops per inhabitant in the area of operations demonstrates a consistent, positive correlation with counterinsurgents’ success in both univariate and multivariate regressions. Troop den-sity also has an advantage over the alternative mea-sures in terms of model fit. This suggests that troops-per-inhabitant is the best way to measure force size in most cases.32

Comparing only army forces, the ARVN had eight and a half times the number of regular and irregu-lar soldiers that Afghanistan has today (1,340,000 to 157,000), in a country one-fourth the size. Their para-military police forces were approximately equal in to-tal numbers, but because of South Vietnam’s smaller area, the South Vietnamese Police had a force density four times higher than the ANP today. South Viet-nam had 1,068,966 men and women in armed militia units, not counting 510,000 regional forces-provincial forces (RF-PFs), who were irregulars formally part of the ARVN. Afghanistan has, on paper, 30,000—a nu-merical militia advantage for South Vietnam of 35-to-1, in a country one-fourth the size. For Afghanistan to have the counterinsurgent militia strength today that South Vietnam had per square mile in 1970, there would have to be 4,011,362 men in the ALP. There might be 24,000 ALP actually present.33 The Iraqi Army, on paper, was twice the size of the ANA, ex-cluding its reserves, with only about 60 percent as much territory to defend. The Iraqi Police were mili-tarily a nonentity. The following sections will now examine qualitative factors.

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COMPARISON OF THE GROUND FORCES

Despite its glaring senior level leadership faults, the ARVN was, in fact, a potent force. As James Willibanks notes:

South Vietnamese combat strength included about 120 infantry battalion in 11 divisions supported by 58 artil-lery battalions, 19 battalion-sized armored units, and many engineer and signal formations. By 1972, the regular ARVN divisions were robust organizations with modern equipment and weapons. They included three infantry regiments of three battalions each, one artillery regiment of three battalions, a cavalry squad-ron, an engineer battalion and various logistics units. In addition to the ARVN divisions, there were 37 border ranger battalions, 21 ranger battalions and the airborne and marine divisions. Complementing the regular forces were the Territorial Forces that included 300,000 Regional Forces and 250,000 Popular Forces (RF/PF) soldiers, and more than 500,000 People’s Self-Defense Forces.34

The ARVN was thus qualitatively and quantitatively vastly superior to the ANA today. Not counting ir-regular forces, the ARVN not only numbered over 710,000 regular soldiers, more than four times as many as the ANA, but it also had a country only the size of Regional Command (RC) South and RC Southwest in Afghanistan to defend. A majority of ARVN non-commissioned officers (NCOs) and field-grade com-missioned officers fought for the French against the Viet Minh, and many had a decade or more of experi-ence as seasoned soldiers. This is much less true of the ANA. In fact, a deliberate decision was made in the Donald Rumsfeld Department of Defense (DoD) to exclude from the ANA anyone who had ever served in a military-type capacity before, such as former

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mujahideen, former communist Afghan Army sold-iers, and members of warlord militias.35 The question-naire for ANA recruits in 2002 (conducted orally, since virtually all recruits were and are illiterate) included the question “Have you ever used a rifle before?” and potential recruits were disqualified if they answered in the affirmative.36 The future Afghan Army was to be idealistically comprised only of youth who were untainted and uncorrupted by violence. In contrast, from the outset, the ARVN fielded a large number of battle-hardened troops. The ARVN had many excel-lent combat formations with hundreds of thousands of tough, battle-tested soldiers. In 1975 there were 54 ARVN Ranger Battalions (in Vietnamese, the Biêt Đông Quân) comprising approximately 29,365 men37 who were as good or better than the equivalent ANA Commandos today.38 As of June 2014, the ANA has nine commando battalions totaling approximately 10,000 men.39

Picture I-1. South Vietnamese Rangers.

South Vietnamese Rangers were as tough as anything the Viet Cong or the NVA could put in the field. There were 54 battalions of them.

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The ARVN also had a well-developed and func-tional logistics system, while it is well-documented and widely accepted that the ANA has virtually no logistics capability.40 As the military proverb runs, “Amateurs talk tactics and professionals talk logis-tics.”41 The ARVN had an abundance of tactical ve-hicles, armored personnel carriers, and two-and-a-half-ton trucks; the ANA is hamstrung by vehicle and fuel shortages. As Antonio Giustozzi notes, as much as two-thirds of the fuel delivered to the ANA is be-ing siphoned off by corruption, according to current estimates.42 The Afghans’ ability to keep running the relatively high-maintenance and high-tech vehicles they have inherited from the United States is also limited.43 In 2014, for example, the Afghan 205 Corps reported that 50 percent of its vehicles were already inoperable.44 On December 11, 2014, departing Inter-national Security Assistance Force (ISAF) Commander Lieutenant General Joseph Anderson told the Reuters news agency that Afghan security forces could not perform even basic maintenance. “The problem is you don’t have units fixing stuff at their level. This is inept. This is nothing to do with corruption. This is purely ineptitude.”45

The ARVN also had a full complement of commu-nications gear, down to the platoon level, with well-trained and experienced operators and working tacti-cal codes; the ANA has few radios and communicates largely in the clear with cell phones.46 In a country where, in many areas, inland waterways were the pri-mary means of transportation, the Vietnamese Navy had absolute brown water supremacy. The ANA, of course, has no navy for obvious reasons, but its ability to keep open even major arteries of the comparable road network of Afghanistan analogous to the rivers

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and waterways of Vietnam is tenuous at best. The vi-tal Route California in Konar Province, for example, was severed by the Taliban for periods of up to a week on several occasions in 2014.47

The ARVN possessed a competent and high-func-tioning medical corps which provided good quality care to wounded soldiers. In Afghanistan, the 2011 ANA Dawood hospital scandal, when it was discov-ered that scores of emaciated ANA wounded had died of their wounds for want of food and basic medicines—which the ANA senior medical officer responsible was selling on the black market—speaks for the state of the ANA’s marginal medical capability.48 Compounding the problem, in one of the most disgraceful episodes of the Afghan war, U.S. military officers attempted to cover up the scandal.49

The other major components of the ARVN were the RF-PF. The South Vietnamese Popular Force (in Vietnamese, nghĩa quân) (sometimes abbreviated SVPF or just PF) consisted of local militias that pro-tected their home villages from attacks by Viet Cong forces and later by People’s Army of Vietnam units (PAVN). These forces originally were called the Civil Guard and Self-Defense Corps. The RF (Vietnam-ese, đįa phuông quân) were also militias formed in the early-1960s. RF manned a country-wide system of outposts and defended tactically vital points such as bridges and crossroads. The đįa phuông quân defended approximately 9,000 key terrain features, nearly half of them in the strategically vital Mekong Delta region. In 1964, the RF were integrated into the ARVN and placed under the command of the Joint General Staff. This was vastly more militarily effective than having such militia forces under the control of the Ministry of the Interior (MOI), as is the case in Afghanistan today.

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In 1969, with the withdrawal of U.S. forces, the RF became increasingly important, and units began to be attached to ARVN battalions directly, and to de-ploy with the ARVN outside their home provinces, a significant force multiplier. By 1973, there were 1,810 RF companies of approximately 140 men each.50 They fought stubbornly, but took heavy casualties. Thomas Thayer, a former analyst in the Secretary of Defense’s Office of Systems Analysis, estimates the RF-PFs suf-fered about 60 percent of the combat casualties within the South Vietnamese security forces and inflicted about 30 percent of enemy casualties.51 This is indica-tive of the fact that, like the ALP in Afghanistan, they were intended for local defense, and like the ALP, they were no match for the Viet Cong Main Force and the PAVN, which are the equivalent of the Taliban to-day. This mismatch in Afghanistan was starkly in evi-dence again on December 21, 2014, for example, when Taliban guerillas hit an ALP checkpoint in Qashtepa district of Jowzjan province, killing at least seven ALP militia and wounding at least five more.52

On an individual soldier level, the overall qual-ity of ANA recruits always has been low and almost all are from the rural areas.53 This is important be-cause, as the Taliban gains control over more of the rural areas, the number of potential recruits coming from those areas will be curtailed. As Giustozzi noted in 2013, the drive to increase ANA numbers rapidly resulted in the weak vetting of recruits:

There has been little effort to vet recruits even in terms of physical fitness. Physically weak, drug-addicted and under-motivated recruits have often proved un-able to withstand even the rather mild 10-week basic training course.54

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This in part also fueled a spike in green-on-blue attacks, which drove a wedge of mistrust between ANA soldiers and their mentors. Interviews with ANA recruits have consistently shown the primary motivation to join has always been money.55 In short, the ARVN was a large, capable, well-equipped, and modern army that could shoot, move, communicate, and sustain. The ANA, one-eighth the size, can barely shoot.

As for Iraq, after Rumsfeld, Douglas Feith, and Paul Bremer made the decision to disband the entire Iraqi Army in May 2003 following the occupation of Baghdad,56 sending home hundreds of thousands of trained and capable soldiers, NCOs and officers with their weapons, there was never any real possibility of creating a cohesive professional Iraqi Army in the po-litical time frame available. As war correspondent Da-vid Axe notes, “Fundamentally, the fault was Amer-ica’s for destroying the existing army, but there was nothing America could do after that to build a truly inclusive and effective new army.”57 The Iraqi Army that was created, armed, and trained for almost a de-cade by the United States at a cost of some $25 billion dollars58 disintegrated as a military force within hours in the summer of 2014 at Mosul in the face of a few hundred ISIS irregulars.59

COMPARISON OF THE AIR FORCES

The ARVN also had a powerful air force, the Viet-namese Air Force (VNAF), comprising 2,075 aircraft, including six squadrons of F-8s, and a large force of helicopters, including an impressive Medevac com-ponent.60 It was, at one time, the world’s fourth larg-est air force. Already by 1970, the VNAF was flying over 300,000 sorties per year.61 In comparison, because

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then-Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld decreed in 2002 that Afghanistan would have no air force,62 the exist-ing Afghan National Air Force (ANAF, the term used by the Afghans themselves) languished with only a few decrepit Soviet legacy Mi-24 Hind and Mi-17 Hipp helicopters until 2009, when the Obama admin-istration took office.63 In 2014, the ANAF flew a total of 7,000 sorties.64 ISAF flew 133,000, of which 34,000 were for close air support (CAS).65 In November 2014 the ANAF still had only three Soviet legacy Hind he-licopters dedicated to the support of all of RC South, including one (as of October 2014 reporting) down for repairs.

As it stands, very few of the ANAF’s current air-craft have operational weapon systems. The ANAF has no operational jets, and currently has no fixed-wing aircraft capable of CAS. It also has no technical or human capability for forward air control.66 A total of 20 of the sturdy Brazilian-made Embraer A-29 Su-per Tucano light aircraft (essentially an operationally mature light trainer design in search of a new market) are planned for delivery to the ANAF from 2015 to 2018.67 The U.S. Air Force (USAF) took delivery of the first aircraft in late-September 2014.68 This little turbo-prop spotter plane can be armed with two machine guns and two rockets or bombs, and it represents the only significant U.S. commitment to the creation of an organic CAS capability within the ANAF. The ANAF also operates a vague number of MD530f (high altitude) Cayuse Warrior light observation helicop-ters, perhaps 10 in all, and in the fall of 2014 a $44 million contract was awarded to MD Helicopters to install one .50 caliber (North Atlantic Treaty Organi-zation [NATO] 12.7 x 99 millimeter [mm]) machine gun pod with an ordnance capacity of 400 rounds on each MD530f.69 An additional 63 well-used and

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renovated Russian Mi-17 Hipp transport helicopters, called “flying tractors” in Afghanistan, have recently been procured for the ANAF.70 (See Picture I-2.) In desperation, the ANAF has begun jerry-rigging ma-chine guns and 57-mm rocket launchers onto some Mi-17 transport helicopters.71 The ANAF Mi-17 fleet is widely reported to be used to transport narcotics. Two investigations, one by the DoD and one by the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), have been conducted to probe this criminal activity.

Picture I-2. ANAF Mi-17 “Flying Tractor.”

The ability of the ANAF to maintain and fly even this tiny fleet and to procure needed spare parts to keep them airworthy is doubtful. In this regard, the situa-tion has actually deteriorated significantly in the past 12 months as a result of sanctions imposed on Russia related to events in the Ukraine. Sanctions have caused

An ANAF Mi-17 “flying tractor” fires 57 mm rockets in training in Kandahar. This would appear to reduce the service life of the landing gear. (U.S. military photo)

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the suspension of procurement of spare parts for the Russian-made aircraft operated by the ANAF,73 with a resulting drop in readiness, a good example of how events far from the battlefield can impact outcomes. Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) maintenance personnel with even rudimentary literacy and me-chanical abilities are hard to attract and are routinely hired away by the higher-paying private sector.74 Af-ghanistan also has a fledgling Special Missions Wing (SMW) for counternarcotics and counterterrorism missions, which the Special Inspector General for Af-ghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) found in 2013 was unable to fly or maintain its aircraft.75 The technical literacy gap is wide and deep. As USAF Lieutenant Colonel Michael Veneri notes, for example, the Na-tional Officer Training Academy in Kabul was unable to inflate any of its soccer balls because it did not have a pump, and the expensive U.S.-provided electrical air compressor was broken, no one knew how to fix it, and no spare parts were available.76 Veneri saw this lack of simple technical know-how as a metaphor for the ANSF’s problems:

Whether weapon systems or air pumps, our technol-ogy confounds them. . . . As I surveyed the landscape of . . . the surrounding Kabul airport, littered with de-tritus from the Soviets, I sensed that either they would do without . . . or they would let things sit and rot when they broke down. I realized that our expecta-tions for them to understand and use our technologies are simply set too high. . . . What we were providing could never be maintained without significant over-sight. We overlooked this requirement.77

South Vietnam and Afghanistan faced different air threats: North Vietnam had an air force, and the Taliban in 2014 does not, although there has been at

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least one credible but officially unverified report by an American military officer that Pakistani military forces flew multiple helicopter missions to resupply Taliban fighters inside Afghanistan’s Nangarhar province in 2007.78 (From 1996-2001, the Pakistani Air Force main-tained and flew aircraft for the Taliban.79) The fact that there were jet-to-jet dogfights between the VNAF and the North Vietnamese Air Force (NVAF) should not obscure the fact, however, that the vast preponder-ance of South Vietnamese air power went to CAS, lo-gistics, resupply, and medevac operations in support of the ARVN, which were never interdicted by North Vietnamese aircraft. The VNAF was far superior qual-itatively and quantitatively to the NVAF, which until the very end of the war in 1975 did not fly in South Vietnamese air space.80 The main point to be observed here is that the ARVN had a large, powerful, mod-ern and self-sustaining air force, with 63,000 person-nel, 2,075 aircraft, and 72 operational squadrons with total freedom of operation to support ground forces in South Vietnam with more than 300,000 sorties per year. The ANA effectively has none at all.

The Iraqi Air Force is also a military nonentity, with approximately 212 aircraft, virtually none of which are modern or even armed,81 and 14,000 personnel.82 When the ISIS terrorist offensive began in June 2014, for all intents and purposes, there was no Iraqi Air Force.83 This contributed significantly to the collapse of the Iraqi Army itself that summer.84 The Iraqi Air Force has recently sourced 12 Su-25 Frogfoot attack aircraft from Russia and ordered 36 Lockheed Martin F-16 Block 52 jets but none of these is currently opera-tional.85 The inclusion of this information on the Iraqi Air Force in this paragraph seems like an afterthought, but the Iraqi Air Force itself was an afterthought.

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COMPARISON OF THE PARAMILITARY POLICE FORCES

For good reasons, police forces are not generally considered to be a part of the equation in calculating military outcomes, and those of South Vietnam and Iraq were no exception. Police are, by definition, a law enforcement mechanism, and one not structured, trained, or equipped to perform as light infantry. Their combat power is so negligible that no one has ever invented a military tactical symbol for a police company (see Appendix II). Third World police forces like the ANP are illiterate and innumerate, corrupt, lightly armed, and barely trained to maintain civil or-der. Their primary “security” function is to man road-blocks, search vehicles for weapons and explosives, and act as a “tripwire” for enemy attacks, relying on reinforcements from nearby army garrisons for sup-port in extremis. As will be seen, the ANP fail at even these basic tasks, and there is little cooperation with the ANA.

Picture I-3. PFF Troops before a Joint Operation with the ARVN.

Tough Police Field Force (PFF) troopers before a joint operation with the ARVN. Note the camouflage fatigues, camouflaged hel-mets, and tracking dogs. The PFF used the dogs to aggressively track insurgents and engage them. The ANSF don’t touch dogs, believing them unclean, and rarely, if ever pursue insurgents.

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The police in South Vietnam, on the other hand, included a number of capable paramilitary police forces, including combat police with armored fighting vehicles. Together, they comprised 12.5 percent of the overall security forces. In Afghanistan, the paramili-tary police forces, including the lightly armed ANP, comprise 56 percent of the security forces. Historical-ly, the police forces of South Vietnam and Iraq were military nonentities in the collapse of those countries in 1975 and 2014, respectively, and the same will be true of Afghanistan.

The police forces of the Republic of [South] Viet-nam included the National Police or RVNP (in Viet-namese the Cânh lúc Quôc gia Viêt Nam Công hòa), the Rural Development Cadres, Provincial Recon-naissance Units, Kit Carson Scouts (Viet Cong defec-tors), and most significantly an elite, division-sized quick-reaction police unit known as the Republic of Vietnam National Police Field Force (in Vietnamese, the Cãnh Sát Dã Chiên or CSDC). None of these valu-able counterinsurgency units have any equivalent in the ANP today. The CSDC was largely comprised of tough, experienced professionals, many of whom had been fighting communist guerillas since the days of the French colonial regime in the 1950s. By August 1971, CSDC strength was 16,500 officers and enlisted men organized into 44 provincial battalions with 90 companies, 242 district platoons and an independent armored cavalry platoon.86

Overall, there were 17.75 counterinsurgent para-military forces (paramilitary police, PSDF, RF-PF, and other paramilitary forces) per square mile in South Vietnam, compared to 0.8 paramilitary forces (para-military police and ANP) per square mile in Afghani-stan today. In other words, in every 10 square mile area of South Vietnam, there were 177 paramilitary

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forces; in Afghanistan there are eight, an RVNP nu-merical advantage of over 22:1. Importantly, the entire operational area of the RVNP was 10,000 square miles smaller than just RC South and RC Southwest com-bined in Afghanistan today, permitting much faster response times by security forces. Furthermore, man for man, the South Vietnamese police were a better paramilitary force than the ANP, with higher literacy (adult literacy in South Vietnam in the 1970s was ap-proximately 80 percent87), far more average years of experience per patrolman, better equipment, lower at-trition, better training, and better pay. Overall adult literacy is about 25 percent in Afghanistan today.88 This means most police and paramilitary forces in South Vietnam were literate, while few in Afghanistan are, as a result of intense private sector competition there for literate employees.

Because of high literacy levels in Vietnam, such leaflets could have an effect.

Picture I-4. South Vietnamese Propaganda Leaflet.

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Attrition is a serious problem for the ANP. ANP desertion rates are difficult to come by and even more difficult to verify. The Congressional Research Service reported on December 2, 2014, that ANP desertions are “far higher than that of the ANA.”89 Giustozzi and Mohammed Isaqzadeh note that attrition in the spring of 2010 was running at 70 percent, dropping to an annualized 60 percent by November.90 In Helmand Province in 2008-09, annual ANP attrition was 57 per-cent, of which 45 percent was a result of desertions and 12 percent a result of combat casualties.91 The U.S. Institute for Peace (USIP), however, cites a figure of 25 percent.92 A reasonable hybrid estimate of police at-trition through desertions, weighted for methodology and reliability, would be about 50 percent per year.

Picture I-5. Training of ANP Patrolmen.

Because annual attrition runs at 50 percent, most ANP patrolmen have little training and little tactical skill. There were so many accidents in training that ANP trainees are given wooden guns, above. Because of reli-ability issues, when they graduate to real guns, they are not given bullets (Barcroft Media/Daily Mail).

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Police forces in all three countries were and are plagued by uneven and politicized leadership, and by a debilitating reputation for corruption. A report re-leased by SIGAR on January 12, 2015, found that there were 152,678 ANP formally on the rolls93 but twice that many ANP identification cards are in circulation. To put it bluntly, no one has any idea how many ANP there actually are, and SIGAR noted that the 152,678 number is largely guesswork. In its in-person 2011 au-dit of ANP personnel, SIGAR found personnel num-bers “ranging from 111,774 to 125,218, a discrepancy of 13,444 personnel.”94 Personnel accountability of the ANP has been a chronic problem since its inception.95

Some percentage of the ANP number consists of nonexistent personnel, or “ghost policemen.” How large is the “ghost policeman” problem? No one knows. In 2006, 20 percent of reported ANP person-nel were found to be nonexistent by the Inspectors General for the Departments of State and Defense in a joint report.96 In 2009, the number had risen to 30 percent, or 25,000 phantom policemen, according to a U.S. embassy cable cited by the U.S. Government Accountability Office.97 The embassy cable reported that police chiefs all over Afghanistan were “creating ‘ghost policemen’” in order to collect their salaries. As SIGAR noted:

Most recently, in August 2014, the Department of Defense Office of Inspector General reported that the MOI processed 4,579 potentially improper salary pay-ments totaling $40 million due to the ministry’s lack of procedures to identify improper payments, such as duplicate payments. The Department of Defense In-spector General also found that MOI officials did not follow payroll procedures and modified payroll docu-ments after the documents had been approved and signed.98

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If the 30 percent “ghost policeman” rate has not improved since 2009, and in January 2014 SIGAR re-ported no reason to believe it has, then the ANP in January 2015 has a total of approximately 107,000 ac-tual personnel. In June 2014, about half of the ANP consisted of actual enlisted “patrolmen” in the field.99 Thus a reasonable estimate of the number of ANP actually in the field in Afghanistan today with guns in their hands would be 53,500 men. About 27,000 of them desert and have to be replaced each year; anoth-er 4,000 are killed in action. As a result, the average level of training per patrolman, years of experience per patrolman, and literacy per patrolman is very low.

Security is not simply a numbers game. It is dan-gerous, even intellectually dishonest, to count such poorly armed and poorly trained paramilitary person-nel as “security forces” in any but the lowest threat security environments, such as, for example, Indian Kashmir today. In 2013, the Taliban launched 6,604 operations, 50 suicide attacks, and 1,704 direct attacks on police,100 killing at least 4,000 policemen.101 Approx-imately 2,000 police checkpoints in Afghanistan were overrun by Taliban hit-and-run attacks in 2014. Most of them were subsequently reestablished nearby, but this entirely misses the point. The Taliban’s tactics are not intended to take and hold rural checkpoints, they are intended to inflict steady casualties on the police and intimidate and demoralize the force. In the insur-gency in Jammu and Kashmir, in comparison, there were 17 attacks on security forces in 2014, causing 11 deaths.102 This is the level of insurgency at which verti-cally integrated policing and other paramilitary forces are effective, not 1,700 attacks.

In a full-blown insurgency like Vietnam and Af-ghanistan, police add so little to the overall military balance that their inclusion gives little more than a

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false sense of security from force numbers, which ap-pear larger without adding any real combat capability. The Taliban are not bicycle thieves or farmers fighting over water rights, they are heavily armed and highly motivated guerillas akin to the Viet Cong Main Force and the PAVN. Indeed, in the final stages of a success-ful insurgency, as defined by the CIA and as Afghani-stan is in now,103 the police are essentially stationary targets providing a source of free weapons, ammuni-tion and equipment for the guerrillas. Using the CIA’s “Guide to the Analysis of Insurgency,” from the high ANP casualty and desertion rates and the number of direct attacks on the police this year, it is clear that in 2014 the ANP are already in over their heads mili-tarily in the “late stage of a successful insurgency,”104 (see Appendix I).

Picture I-6. Taliban Fighters and a Mixed Group of Viet Cong and PAVN Troops.

Taliban fighters, top (Reuters/Wahdat). Mixed group of Viet Cong and PAVN troops, bottom.

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The ability of the ANP to carry out sustained re-sistance in the face of a determined and numerically superior enemy force in rural areas is very limited. The ANP are, in fact, a net security negative, in the sense that their existence contributes more overall to insecurity than to security.

There are four basic components of this overall net negative rating: First, their corruption alienates the lo-cal population and spurs Taliban recruiting.105 A recent survey found the level of confidence in the ANP in the Pashtun provinces of Kandahar, Zabul, and Paktika was below 25 percent,106 and half of all Afghans inter-viewed said they had personally experienced police corruption.107 Police corruption has been frequently cited as one of the most common causes of popular support and recruiting for the Taliban.108 Their cor-ruption may well be creating more Taliban than they are taking off the field in combat. That alone would make them a net security negative. As the Marine Lieutenant Colonel heading the police advisory group in Sangin in 2013 noted, “If you shut down all their corruption schemes, the police would cease to exist.” He noted with obvious frustration that the local police chief is “a murderer and child molester” who “treats the people of Sangin as his personal piggy-bank.” The Marine reported all of this up the chain of command, and, reporter Ben Anderson observed, “Nothing was ever done.” “Having to work with people like this,” the Marine officer said, “[in order] to get the mission done . . . kind of wears on you.”109

Second, their ubiquitous, system-wide focus on taking bribes means little actual added security. Police “checkpoints” (usually a rock or two in the middle of the road) are almost universally the venue for shaking down motorists and truck drivers for bribes. The secu-rity function of these checkpoints is routinely negated

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when 10 rupees will bypass the requirement for an inspection of passengers and cargo. Anyone moving insurgent leaders or materiel by car or truck simply pays the bribe.

Picture I-7. ANP Patrolmen Taking Bribes Not to Inspect Cargo or Pedestrians.

Above, an Afghan National Policeman taking a rou-tine bribe from a truck driver not to inspect the cargo, caught on a CBS News surveillance video. Below, an ANP patrolman takes a bribe from a pedestrian not to search him. This unversal behavior simply alienates the people and is “security” (as in “ANSF”) in name only.

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Third, their casualties demoralize civilians in-clined to support the government. The ANP are being liquidated systematically, and the local civilian popu-lation sees this. An average of 11 ANP personnel are killed every day as stationary targets in indefensible fixed positions.110 For example, four policemen were captured and later murdered in Wardak province on January 3, 2015, by a Taliban battle group.111 On January 4, 2015, five more were attacked and killed by a much larger Taliban force in Baraki Barak dis-trict of Logar province.112 On January 12, 2015, the Police Chief of Mazan district in Zabul province was killed, along with two of his bodyguards.113 In Decem-ber 2014, ANP casualties were at an all-time high.114 Almost 3,000 ANP were killed in action in 2013, and 3,500 were killed in action in the first 10 months of 2014, suggesting the 2014 year-end ANP killed in ac-tion (KIA) statistic reached 4,000.115 At least 12,000 more were wounded.116 Many ANP units in the south and southwest and even northern Kapisa province are engaged in combat with jihadists on an almost daily basis.117 In fact, the insurgency has grown far beyond anything these untrained and lightly armed constabu-laries can cope with.

Fourth, their passive, static nature and easily overrun positions are a free arsenal from which the Taliban can acquire more weapons, ammunition, and equipment. In military terms, in a high-threat envi-ronment as Afghanistan is now, a static force focused on defending its own positions contributes little to the battlefield. The ANP have little mobility, very little firepower, are dependent on the local community for logistics, and have little or no initiative and offensive spirit. In the Armed Forces Journal in 2012, for example, Lieutenant Colonel Daniel L. Davis reported Ameri-

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can troops in Kunar province as saying the ANP rare-ly leave their checkpoints.118 Following one Taliban attack on a police checkpoint, Davis himself asked the police commander if he regularly pursued attacking insurgents. The ANP commander looked at him “with an incredulous expression” then laughed and replied, “No, we don’t go after them. That would be danger-ous!”119 Counting the ANP as “ANSF” is a chimera, and lumping them into a larger “security forces” num-ber as equal and interchangeable units with a value of “one” is willful self-deception (see Appendix II).

In comparison, the Iraqi Police Service (IPS) num-bered on paper approximately 25,000 policemen in 2007, of whom about a third were on leave at any given time.120 The police forces in Iraq only comprised about 3 percent of the overall security forces. At the time of the U.S. invasion, Iraq had one of the highest male literacy rates in the Middle East,121 and most Iraqi policemen were literate. Iraq had no government-rec-ognized paramilitary forces. In 2014, during the ad-vance of the terrorist organization known as ISIS, the IPS disintegrated within minutes wherever the two forces came into contact, the IPS often fleeing in their vehicles ahead of the ISIS lead elements. In an over-all comparison of the capability of the police forces in these three countries to maintain civil order in rural areas and act as paramilitary first-responders to insur-gent attacks, the RVNP ranks first by a wide margin, followed far behind by the ANP. In the collapse of the security forces in both Vietnam and Iraq, the Vietnam-ese police and the IPS were militarily insignificant. This in particular bodes poorly for the situation in Afghanistan, where in comparison to Iraq (3 percent) and Vietnam (12.5 percent), the weak paramilitary po-lice comprise 56 percent of the security providers in the overall force (see Appendix II).

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The failure of the police to be able to match up to the threat is another lesson unlearned from the Viet-nam war. The challenges facing both police trainers and policymakers in South Vietnam in the early-1960s are so strikingly relevant to the situation in Afghani-stan today that they bear quoting at length:

The growth of the insurgency created a dilemma for American police advisors. As eager as they were to de-velop civilian law enforcement institutions, they also recognized that lightly armed police, particularly in the countryside, the area of the insurgency’s greatest strength, were likely to be overwhelmed by aggressive and disciplined communist guerilla forces. American military critics of police-oriented counter-insurgency strategies had argued that police and paramilitary forces were no match for the PLAF [People’s Libera-tion Armed Forces]. American police advisors even-tually reached the same conclusion. The Viet Cong’s strength was apparent every time PSD [personal secu-rity detail] personnel left Saigon. Guerilla ambushes were a routine feature of the environment in Viet-nam’s hinterlands. Few civilian police were operating in rural areas, but what few there were encountered a communist adversary who was often better trained and equipped. Villages controlled by the PAVN were virtually no-go areas for Diem’s law enforcement agencies. The Civil Guard, Self-Defense Corps (SDC) and village militias were receiving generous American assistance to provide security for the Strategic Hamlet Program. The paramilitary forces, however, failed to halt communist violence in the countryside.122

The lack of cooperation between the ANP and the ANA is a major area of security failure. The ANA rarely acts in concert with ANP, and the antagonism between them has sharply reduced security levels. In late-December 2014, The New York Times quoted an ANP patrolman named Mohammad Saleh as saying

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“The army rarely conducts joint operations with the police, leaving [the police] to do most of the fighting.” Another policeman added “Only the asphalt road is under the control of the government in Sangin. Ev-erything else is Taliban.”123 In November 2014, Stars and Stripes reporter Josh Smith observed in Laghman province what was supposed to be a joint ANA/ANP operation. The ANA were firing a 122-mm Soviet ar-tillery piece more or less at random toward a police operation a mile or two away. Later in the day while the police were still engaging insurgents with small arms, the ANA packed up and went home without telling the police.124

In some parts of the country, this lack of coopera-tion results in armed conflict between the ANA and the ANP. In the summer of 2014, for example, combat between the ANA and the ANP occurred in Helmand province.125 The failure of the ANA and ANP to coop-erate and coordinate security does not bode well for the longevity of the security forces, and it is such a severe problem today that it has recently received at-tention from both the outgoing ISAF commander and Afghan President Ashraf Ghani. In December 2014, departing Commander of ISAF Lieutenant General Jo-seph Anderson noted the Ministry of Defense and the Ministry of Interior need to figure out how to coop-erate—when new Ministers are approved and sworn into office. “Right now they don’t have the forces,” Anderson noted, “and they don’t have the cooperation between the entities.”126 Afghan news source TOLO News reported on December 16, 2014, that:

in a meeting with Afghan National Army officers in Kabul, [President Ashraf] Ghani . . . stressed there was a lack of coordination between the Ministry of De-

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fense, Ministry of Interior, and the National Director-ate of Security.127

On December 11, Anderson added: “You’ve got a mix right now of uniform police, civil obedience po-lice, and the army, all in the same footprint debating over who’s got primacy for responsibility. That’s a fundamental issue here.”128 The outgoing head of the European Union (EU) Police Mission in Afghanistan (EUPOL), Karl Ake Roghe, said in December 2014:

This is the main problem for Afghanistan—how they are dividing the responsibilities for fighting the insur-gency. This should be a task for the Afghan National Army, not the police. Currently it belongs to the police and the main part of the fight is done by the police. . . . They are doing this totally alone, and, of course, they are not properly equipped for this task.129

Even when the army is inclined to support the po-lice, the ANA’s relative lack of tactical mobility and firepower has made it difficult for the Afghan Army to reinforce the ANP quickly. In addition, in Afghani-stan, the police are armed with the AK-47 family of rifles, firing 7.62-mm caliber ammunition; while the ANA is now equipped with the M-16 family of rifles, chambering 5.56-mm ammunition. As a result, the ANA and the ANP cannot share ammunition, so that when the ANA are called in to support ANP garrisons or outposts under attack, if the ANA respond at all, they cannot resupply the police with ammunition, a tactical interoperability failure with major operational implications.

However, in some areas, ANP performance is bet-ter than ANA performance, and they are more reli-able. Two American Special Forces personnel were

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killed and another four wounded in the Tagab district center of Kapisa Province 50 miles east of Kabul in February 2014 by a green-on-blue attack. The area is riddled with Taliban as The New York Times reports:130

American Special Forces soldiers who have operated in the area describe a disciplined Taliban force that has been able to operate freely. Its ability to issue and execute orders is exacting, and ambushes are orches-trated with precision.131

The performance of the ANA in the district was described as “lackluster,” and it was determined that the ANA was so thoroughly infiltrated by the Taliban that the decision was made to cease operations with them and try working with the ANP garrison there instead.132 In Tagab and elsewhere, however, the ANP lack the firepower, manpower, and willpower to take the fight to the enemy. The New York Times reporter present in a skirmish in November 2014 reported that the ANP fought a static, defensive battle:

As the firing continued and drew closer, the Afghan forces threw everything they had at the insurgents. They lobbed grenades, fired rockets, and emptied clips, but never left the road . . . for the most part, they refused to enter the valley and pursue the Taliban.133

The point to be observed here is simply that, in a comparison of the post-U.S. departure environments of South Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan for pur-poses of assessing outcomes, the paramilitary forces of South Vietnam were far superior, qualitatively and quantitatively, to those of Afghanistan today, and they comprised only a small fraction of the overall force. In Afghanistan, they are more than half the force. Those of Iraq were irrelevant.

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COMPARISON OF THE IRREGULAR FORCES

South Vietnam had a very large and comparatively well-equipped and well-organized body of irregulars, some of whom had embedded U.S. advisors for years as part of the Marine Corps’ Combined Action Platoon (CAP) program instituted by Marine General Walt in I Corps.134 The ARVN could depend on local support from some 510,000 RF-PFs (or “ruff-puffs” as they were referred to in the argot of the time), and vice ver-sa. The RF-PFs were similar in concept to the ALP now being hastily established as a part of the Village Sta-bility Operations (VSO) underway today in Afghani-stan, but critically, in terms of their effectiveness and sustainment, they were a part of the Ministry of De-fense. In Afghanistan, these forces are illogically and inefficiently connected to the police and the faraway (and notoriously corrupt) MOI in Kabul, rather than to the local ANA battalion, making close operational cooperation with the ANA difficult or impossible. In Vietnam, the paramilitary wiring diagram was more logically and more efficiently vertically integrated to the ARVN and the Ministry of Defense. In South Viet-nam, both the regular army and the irregulars (such as the ALP would be considered) were in the same chain of command and had interoperable weapons and communications equipment. In Afghanistan, the ALP are expressly prohibited from participating in offensive actions.135

In both Vietnam and Afghanistan, however, the overall number of village defense groups supported by embedded American forces was and is limited; in Viet-nam by the relatively small size of the Marine Corps’ CAP program in I Corps, and the unwillingness of the U.S. Army to have any part of the program,136 and in

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Afghanistan by the limited number of Special Forces/Special Operations Forces (SF/SOF) teams available. Once again, as in 2005, current requirements in Iraq for these “high demand, low density” forces are hav-ing an impact on the VSO effort in Afghanistan by re-ducing the number of SF/SOF personnel available. In many areas of Afghanistan, the VSO teams, or “plat-forms,” have already “thinned up,” (i.e., moved up to the district center level of operations from the village level) as part of the operating concept to “shape, hold, build, expand, and transition.”137 The CAP program was highly successful because it was connected direct-ly to the ARVN and the Marine Corps in I Corps.138 As Max Boot notes, “No village protected under CAP was ever retaken by the Viet Cong.”139 The same can-not be said of the ALP.

Roughly similar levels of effort were expended in Vietnam and Afghanistan to create such secure ham-lets and, in theory, gradually expand them together into ink blots of territory in armed opposition to the in-surgents. Overall, in strategic terms, the scale of these operations in comparison to the sizes of the countries and the percentages of villages engaged, however, could best be described as “experimental.” There are approximately 60,000 villages in Afghanistan in 410 districts,140 and the VSO program is authorized to con-duct operations in approximately 100 districts. The ex-act number of villages in the program is not publicly available, but a design force size of 30 men per vil-lage and 300 men per district is standard.141 Given an overall program force size of 30,000 men, a total of ap-proximately 1,000 villages could be involved, or pro-portionally 10 per district in each of the approximately 100 districts authorized.142 That would correspond to about 1/60th of all the villages in Afghanistan.

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Picture I-8. ALP Forces in Sar Hawza District.

The CAP program that supported the PSDF and the RF-PFs was limited to the operational area of the Marines in I Corps, the northernmost of four Corps in South Vietnam, with regional responsibility shared with the Army, because the Army had no interest in the program. Instead, American SF/SOF personnel operated with the Civilian Irregular Defense Groups (CIDG), which were converted into ARVN Border Ranger Battalions in 1970 and hence are not consid-ered here. The size of the Combined Action Platoon program reached its maximum size in 1970 at four Groups with 114 companies of approximately 100 men each spread throughout the five provinces of I Corps.143

ALP forces in Sar Hawza District of Paktika Province, where the author served, in 2011. One elder, seven boys and five rifles. This is what is supposed to stop the Tali-ban. Photo by Heidi Voight/AP.

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As a military comparison, the RF-PFs were certain-ly more numerous (510,000 men), more capable, better disciplined, and better organized than the somewhat comparable ALP forces (maximum 30,000 men) being created as quickly as possible in parts of southern Af-ghanistan. The RF-PFs inflicted about 30 percent of the casualties suffered by the Viet Cong.144 In Afghanistan, by January 2012, there were 57 validated districts in which approximately 11,066 ALP operated. The MOI subsequently approved the recruitment of 30,000 ALP to serve in 99 of 410 districts throughout the coun-try,145 and that goal has apparently been reached on paper. However, public estimates of the actual size of the ALP and the VSO program are sharply divergent. The Long War Journal, for example, stated on March 28, 2013, that there were:

currently . . . about 70 VSO sites, and each site consists of approximately 12 local police. The total force in Af-ghanistan to date is about 800 local police and is a far cry from the proposed 10,000 sought out by President Karzai and NATO/ISAF forces.146

It is difficult to see how it would be possible to grow from 360 men (70 sites x 12 men each) in March 2013 or even “800 men”147 to 30,000 men 18 months later.

It should be noted that the ALP is simply the latest in a long and muddled history of such intermittent, half-hearted, short-lived, and unsuccessful U.S. mili-tary experiments with irregular forces unwisely con-nected to the MOI in Afghanistan,148 including Com-munity-Based Security Solutions (CBSS), the Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP) Program, Intermediate Security for Critical Infrastructure (ISCI), the Afghan Public Protection Program (AP3), and Local Security Forces (LSF). The last category includes unlicensed

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private security companies, militias, and Arbakai forc-es still in operation as of 2012.149 Not included here are the CIA’s notoriously renegade and above-the-law150 Counterterrorist Pursuit Teams in the Kunar region,151 the 3,500 man Khost Protection Force (KPF)152 and the Cultural Exploitation Units (CEUs). One of the most notorious, the Kandahar Strike Force, has been repeat-edly accused of human rights violations and described as “the most shadowy and the most unaccountable in the country.”153 The KPF once attacked a police station in Kandahar and killed the ANP police chief in order to break one of their militiamen out of jail who was awaiting trial for murder.154

These efforts have been consistently carried out against the advice of many Afghanistan experts, who correctly pointed out that unless these forces were in-corporated into the ANA in some fashion, rather than functioning as stand-alone “police” forces loosely connected to the local police and thence to the distant and infamously corrupt MOI, the ALP would soon de-volve into warlord militias committing human rights abuses, including extrajudicial killings. That is exactly what has happened.155 “Not only do they murder,” as Dexter Filkins notes, “they also steal, tax, and rape.”156 The Congressional Research Service notes that “the ALP program has been cited by Human Rights Watch and other human rights groups for killings, rapes, ar-bitrary detentions, and land grabs.”157 Oxfam added child sexual abuse to the list.158 The allegations were frequent enough that the U.S. Government was forced to launch an investigation into the abuses and found many of them credible.159 In May 2011, Oxfam report-ed that design procedures and community protections built into the program on paper are often circum-vented on the ground160 and warned of “communities

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living in fear of government-supported community defense initiatives they see as criminal gangs.”161 As the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) reported:

UNAMA observed weaknesses in the recruitment, vetting, training and discipline of ALP as local com-munities in some areas reported ALP involvement in criminality and serious human rights violations, including the displacement of civilians, abduction, physical and sexual abuse, and extortion. UNAMA observed . . . a lack of accountability and oversight of some ALP operations. In addition, despite procedures for the vetting of individuals required to be conducted by local shuras, UNAMA observed that in some areas local power brokers influenced which individuals were nominated and ratified as ALP members with some individuals with documented human rights abuses joining the ALP. In some cases, the ALP did not appear to reflect the ethnic balance in the areas they operated adding to tensions within communities. In some areas, former illegal armed groups were ab-sorbed into ALP raising concerns in local communities that the ALP was used to legitimize such individuals and their activities.162

On July 4, 2012, The Washington Post reported an ALP unit of 41 men in Badghis had defected en masse to the Taliban.163 In June 2013, another ALP unit of six men in Panirak village of Bala Murghab district of Badghis province also joined Taliban militants, tak-ing their weapons and equipment with them.164 Other ALP militias are making deals with the Taliban they were supposed to fight. In October 2014, for example, it was reported by the Guardian newspaper that the ALP unit in the Gizab District of Uruzgan Province—once specifically touted as the showpiece of the ALP and VSO programs in Afghanistan165—has done exact-ly that. The Taliban has reestablished control over 80

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percent of the district.166 In November 2014, ALP units in Logar, Maidan, Wardak, and Ghazni provinces, which have gone unpaid by the Afghan government for months, were reported to be selling their weapons and ammunition to the Taliban to feed their families.167

Like the ANP, the ALP has also been forced into conflict beyond its design parameters and tactical abil-ities and is over its head. As Stars and Stripes reporter Josh Smith notes:

The ALP was initially envisioned as a sort of national guard that would live at home until called out, [but] the high demands of the unending violence [have] forced many ALP to man checkpoints and other bases around the clock.168

Having been pushed into this battle by the VSO pro-gram, they are now marked for death by the Taliban169 and they are on their own. Haji Iqbal, an ALP com-mander in Dowlat Shah district of Laghman province, says they have received no support from the Afghan government. “Communities are paying for this them-selves,” Haji Iqbal said, “and the lack of resources means they are often outgunned by the enemy.”170 Haji Noorani, an ALP commander in neighboring Alishang district, agrees. “If the current situation continues, the whole province will eventually return to the Taliban,” Noorani said, adding, “the politicians say all is well, but it is not true.”171

Entropy, or gradual decline into disorder, is the second law of thermodynamics but the first law of Af-ghan security. It is a fact that counterinsurgency is a dirty business, and, as many writers have noted, there are few “good guys” in Afghanistan.172 It is also true that guerilla warfare cannot be won by bureaucrats in Washington fighting by the Marquis of Queensbury’s Rules.173 But by any reasonable standard, police-based

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irregulars in Afghanistan like the ALP and their pre-decessors have a dismal track record in the business of winning hearts and minds. They are a poor idea being stubbornly pursued by American military leaders in Special Operations Command (SOCOM) with a thim-bleful of Afghan cultural knowledge, a hagiographic view of Special Forces, and a seemingly perverse bent to explore every possible iteration of getting irregular forces wrong.

STRATEGIC IMPACT OF IRREGULARS

In South Vietnam and in Afghanistan and Iraq today, there are ethnic groups, tribes, and clans that were or are staunchly opposed to the insurgents and that fought or are fighting desperately to prevent an insurgent takeover of their lands, fearing in many cas-es genocidal retribution if they fail. In Vietnam, these included the Hmong and the Montanyards of the high-lands; in Iraq today the Kurds and the Yazidi minority community; and in Afghanistan, they include several disenfranchised Pashtun tribes with long-standing antipathies to the Taliban tribes, the Shi’a Hazara eth-nic group, and much of the Dari- and Uzbek-speaking population in the northern areas.

For example, the Mashwari (or Meshwari) tribe of Dangam district of Konar province has been “rabidly anti-Taliban” for many years.174 According to the Of-fice of the United Nations High Commissioner for Ref-ugees (UNHCR) this animosity precedes the attacks of September 11, 2001, in the United States.175 In late-November and early-December 2014, it was reported that there was a “tribal uprising” against the Pakistani Taliban (Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, or TTP) in Dangam district.176 The Mashwari receive military support by being members of an ALP militia in Dangam district.

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It would be incorrect to attribute the “uprising” to a yearning on the part of the people of Dangam district to be free from the Taliban and to support the nation-al government, however. In actuality, the Mashwari are one of two major tribes in the district. The other tribe, the Salazai, have been at war with the Mashwari for decades, and they receive military support in ex-change for loyalty and fealty to the Taliban.177 Thus each side has forged an outside military alliance, a common practice in the feuds of the Afghan hills. The conflict in Dangam district is thus a tribal war, not a government vs. insurgents war. The Mashwari do not want to kill Taliban, they want to kill Salazai.

Historically, such irregular forces were a militar-ily insignificant part of South Vietnamese resistance to invasion from the north. For the first 6 months of the ISIS terrorist offensive in Iraq, the Kurdish mili-tias (collectively termed the Peshmerga) struggled to protect their own ethnic communities, and only in mid-December 2014 began to push back into ISIS-held territory—with the help of heavy U.S. air support.178

Most importantly, between 1996 and 2001 in Af-ghanistan, irregulars akin to the ALP today loosely al-lied under the banner of the Northern Alliance, with-out tactical exception, proved to be unable to defeat the Taliban and hold their ground. From 1996 to 2001, Northern Alliance irregulars often fought stubbornly, but were always on the defensive, fighting holding actions and retrograde movements. Once outside the territory of their own clans, they often ceased fighting, a universal characteristic of conflict in Afghanistan.179 They were ultimately betrayed by Uzbek commander Abdul Malik Pahlawan and his Uzbek militiamen from the Uzbek Junbish party (Junbish-e Milli-i Islami-i Afghanistan). Ismael Khan was captured, and Abdul Rashid Dostum escaped to Turkey. By July 2001, the

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Northern Alliance had yielded control of virtually all of Afghanistan to the Taliban. Afghan history shows that tribal irregulars cannot hold back, let alone re-verse, the momentum of religious movements like the Taliban.

In Iraq today, only larger and more ethnically cohesive irregulars such as the Kurdish Peshmerga, which received virtually no support and training from the United States prior to 2014, constitute meaning-ful resistance to ISIS. The extent to which U.S. Army training and equipment increases a fragile foreign government’s chances of survival is debatable: the U.S.-trained and equipped Iraqi Army collapsed in a matter of hours during the ISIS offensive in the sum-mer of 2014, while the Kurds, a downtrodden and per-secuted minority in three countries that received no U.S. military support prior to 2014, are putting up a stiff resistance in Iraq and Syria today. The difference is that the Kurds think of themselves as a nation and are willing to fight and die for it. There is no substi-tute for nationhood, a concept that will be explored in depth in Part II.

MILITARY CONCLUSIONS REGARDING COMPARABLE FORCE SIZES

The point here is not to belabor the comparison of the equivalent Afghan, Iraqi, and South Vietnamese army, paramilitary, and local irregular forces. Rather, the four key points to consider are these:

1. All of the security forces of all types of South Vietnam and the Iraqi Army were qualitatively and quantitatively vastly superior to those in Afghanistan today, and both quickly collapsed for reasons that will be discussed in Part II.

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2. All of the militia-type forces in South Vietnam and Iraq (the Peshmerga) were far larger in size, bet-ter equipped, better mentored, and better trained than the paramilitary ANP is today, but they did not play any militarily significant role in the events of 1975 and 2014. The ANP, which comprises more than half the ANSF on paper (56 percent), is already overmatched by numerically superior and better-armed Taliban combat groups, is taking heavy casualties as a result, and is a net security negative (see Appendix II). Simi-larly, the ANP will play no militarily significant role in the events of 2015-19. Counting them as “security forces” is intellectually dishonest.

3. All of the security forces in South Vietnam, Iraq, and the Northern Alliance from 1996 to 2001 were far superior qualitatively and quantitatively in numbers and equipment to those of the ANSF today, and all three were roundly defeated on the battlefield.

4. The security forces of South Vietnam in 1975 outnumbered those in Afghanistan today 28-to-1 per square mile, and 5.4-to-1 per 1,000 inhabitants. South Vietnam lost.

In conclusion, the military, paramilitary police forces, and irregulars in South Vietnam and Iraq in 1975 and 2014, respectively, and in Afghanistan from 1996-2001, were simply no match for the disci-plined, mobile, highly motivated, battle-tested, and more heavily armed troops they faced and still face today, whether they were ISIS, the Viet Cong main force, the PAVN, the Taliban, or the North Viet-namese Army (NVA). In terms of objective analy-sis, there is no realistic military possibility that the undersized and underequipped “ANSF,” lacking CAS, logistics, and medical support, and dispropor-tionately comprised of combat-weak police, will fare

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better than the ARVN, the Iraqi Army, the Soviet- Afghan army, or the Northern Alliance.

CLOSE AIR SUPPORT: THE SINE QUA NON OF AFGHAN NATIONAL SECURITY FORCES SURVIVAL

As has been discussed, the ANAF does not cur-rently have any aircraft equipped to conduct CAS, the ANA does not have a single Forward Air Controller (FAC) trained to call for it, and the only capability cur-rently in the pipeline for the ANAF is 20 light A-29 Super Tucano trainers adapted to carry an ordnance load-out of two wing-mounted machine guns and two bombs or rockets.180

CAS is one of the most difficult functions of a mod-ern military force. Even with extensive and recurring training and practice, there are often tragic mistakes, such as the one that killed five American soldiers in Zabul province in June 2014.181 The basic building blocks of competent close air support are aircraft de-signed for the mission, like the A-10 Warthog, highly numerate and well-educated FAC officers with months of training in specialized schools, advanced commu-nications equipment with encrypted transmissions to prevent enemy countermeasures, and sophisticated methods of target designation and marking. The abil-ity to operate advanced global positioning system equipment and maps, make accurate calculations of enemy positions, calculate aircraft approach vectors, determine the location and proximity of all friendly troops on a constantly shifting battlefield, and com-municate calmly and clearly while under enemy fire does not come easily, and it is beyond anything the Afghans are capable of in the next 5 years.

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For deploying the A-29 Super Tucanos, rudimen-tary target marking methods such as colored smoke rounds put on target by mortars, as were sometimes used in World War II, could be made to work by the ANA—if they had trained forward air controllers (FACs), the necessary mortars and marking rounds in each unit, the tactical skill in each unit to put the marking rounds on the target, suitable communica-tions equipment and training to enable ANA spotters on the ground to communicate with ANAF pilots, and if the ANAF had any aircraft capable of mount-ing weapons systems. As of December 2014, they do not have any of that. Assuming they could gain this capability rapidly with the four A-29s to be delivered in 2015 and put it into full operational use by the end of 2015, it would be entirely inadequate to the threat. As Giustozzi notes, “Neither the armed opposition nor Afghan Army troops on the ground are likely to be very impressed with these assets, having become accustomed to the mighty power of the USAF.”182

During one period of particularly intense fighting around Sangin district in the late summer of 2014, for example, four Apache attack helicopters and an AC-130 Specter gunship were rotated continuously on sta-tion for nearly 2 days, with the Apaches completely expending their ordnance load-outs eight times.183 The same scenario was repeated in the battle for the town of Sangar in Ajristan district of Ghazni province in late-September 2014. According to The Los Angeles Times, Afghan Commandos again had to be called in to prevent the town from being overrun by massed Taliban fighters conducting a “well-planned attack.” Again, the commandos were backed by U.S. Apache helicopter gunships. “It was not pretty” said an Af-ghan NDS officer quoted by the Times, “just when we were about to collapse, at the last minute they sent

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in two foreign helicopters.”184 Anyone who has ever witnessed it knows that this represents a staggering concentration of sustained firepower. The little A-29s with their two wing-mounted machine guns, limited ammunition, and two small bombs or rockets (which have not yet been sourced) cannot begin to replace the heavier gunships.

Picture I-9. The AC-130 Specter Gunship, A-10 Warthog, and Super Tucano Trainer.

The AC-130 Specter gunship, top, and A-10 Wart-hog, middle, lighting up targets. The Super Tucano light trainer, bottom, equipped with two machine guns and two rockets or bombs, is scheduled to re-place them on the battlefield.

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At the same time, in practical terms, the ANA call-ing for CAS from U.S. military assets is, in soldier par-lance, a “nonstarter.” Afghans are not trained to do it; there is a huge language barrier; they do not have the communications equipment for it; for security reasons, we are not going to give it to them; and we do not even allow the U.S. Army to call for fire sup-port directly from U.S. Navy and Marine Corps assets. (ANGLICO teams are attached to the U.S. Army for this purpose.185) Even then, there are tragic mistakes and deaths from friendly fire. Furthermore, there were far too many cases in the prosecution of the war in Afghanistan in which the United States was duped into conducting airstrikes aimed not at the Taliban, but at the informant’s own personal enemies. The bot-tom line is that the only way the ANA is going to get U.S. CAS is if there are U.S. SF or SOF personnel on the ground with them to call for it. In this respect in particular, the failure to screen and vet ANA recruits adequately is coming home to roost at this stage of the war.186 Because of the danger of green-on-blue attacks, this entails U.S. teams deploying only with reliable Afghan troops, such as the commando battalions.

Artillery and mortars in the hands of the ANA will not be a substitute for CAS. ANA use of artillery sup-port was termed “dubious” by Stars and Stripes report-er Josh Smith in November 2014, who observed a 122-mm Soviet artillery piece being fired more or less at random toward a police operation a mile or two away. Major Eric Lightfoot, an artillery mentor, noted in January 2015 that the Afghans use a howitzer “sort of like a tank, for direct fire at enemies they [can] see.”187 The ANA mortaring of a village in Sangin district in January 2015, killing dozens of women and children at a wedding party, was typical of the ANA’s indiscrimi-nate use of fire support, according to Graeme Smith,

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the director of the International Crisis Group in Kabul. “I’m actually surprised that we haven’t heard more complaints like this,” Smith said:

all of the anecdotal feedback is that ANSF have a very loose conception of the ‘enemy’ and uses artillery to blast locations they understand as ‘Taliban villages.’ My best guess is that civilian casualties frequently happen without complaints being registered, because the tribal groups associated with the insurgency don’t feel they have any access to mechanisms of accountability.188

In November 2014, The New York Times revealed that President Obama signed a directive extending the U.S. combat role in Afghanistan through 2015. This was done in the wake of the Taliban campaign in Hel-mand province in the summer of 2014, in which it be-came clear that major Afghan government garrisons in the province would have been overrun without U.S.-supplied CAS. The presidential decision permits U.S. forces to assist the ANA by conducting air strikes, essentially by allowing them to perform both sides of the equation (requesting and delivering) through 2015.189 The fact that the President of the United States was convinced that this step needed to be taken, at the political cost of abrogating his promise to the Ameri-can public to end the U.S. combat role in Afghanistan at the end of 2014,190 attests to the urgency of the lack of confidence of senior U.S. military leaders in the abil-ity of the ANA to survive in 2015 without it. Indeed, the withdrawal of American close air support will be the beginning of the end for the ANA in the parts of southern and eastern Afghanistan where Pashtu is the predominant language.

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THE UNENDING CIVIL WAR

To see how these force capabilities will play out in the future of Afghanistan, it will be useful now to put the current situation in context, to zoom out to the 30,000-foot level, as it were, and examine the bigger picture. What is happening in Afghanistan today is not primarily a government vs. guerillas conflict. It is primarily a civil war. Afghanistan has been in a state of civil war, sometimes a cold war but most often a hot one, since 1973, more than 40 years. Entire library shelves are filled with academic treatises on the rea-sons for this conflict, and, to be certain, the reasons behind the conflict are as complex as the conflict itself. Almost anything one writes about Afghanistan runs the risk of being seen as too simplistic and reduction-ist. It is as if the English language itself is not nuanced enough to describe the intricately tangled web that is Afghanistan. There is, in fact, not one single war go-ing on, but many interconnected ones, involving ac-tors whose motivations run the gamut from religious fervor to mercenary gain, and these motivations are rarely pure or mutually exclusive.

There is a religious war, or holy war, taking place, that, on one level, is part of a cyclical pattern of Pash-tun jihad in the region dating back centuries.191 This element of the civil war in Afghanistan not only pits the Deobandi-inspired Taliban groups against the more moderate Hannafi Sunnis of the other ethnic groups and mixed communities of the north and east, it also pits the hard-line Sunnis of the Taliban against the ethnic minority Shi’a Hazara people of central Af-ghanistan. This kind of sectarian animus, whose in-tensity is being demonstrated so clearly in Iraq today, was already severe enough during the first period of

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Taliban rule between 1996 and 2001 to provoke mass murders of the Hazara people and innumerable indi-vidual crimes against them across the Hazarajat by the Taliban during their reign.192 The Hazaras, more so than any other ethnic group in Afghanistan, used the period of American engagement from 2001 to 2014 and the opportunities it offered to improve their tra-ditional position as a permanent underclass in Afghan society. Despite deep-rooted discrimination and prej-udice against them, for example, they are prominent in the army and at Kabul University.193 Development programs in the Hazarajat were generally welcomed with open arms and experienced less of the subter-fuge, security problems, and rampant corruption that plagued development efforts in the south. This refusal on the part of the Hazaras to accept their traditional underclass position in Afghan society has resulted in a backlash of resentment on the part of the other ethnic groups surrounding them. All four Hazaras nominat-ed to ministerial posts by President Ghani were voted down by the Wolesi Jirga in January 2015. In military terms, these factors will intensify the violence against them and elevate future levels of retribution by the Taliban to the intensity being perpetrated against the Kurds and Yazidi and Shi’a populations by the ISIS terrorist group in Iraq and Syria today.

In addition to religious war, there is a constant struggle for Afghanistan’s minimal wealth and re-sources among rival armed groups. These resources consist primarily of opium and increasingly profitable marijuana exports, but also include timber, semi-pre-cious gems like lapis lazuli, and archeological relics, all of which are smuggled out relatively easily. Rep-resentations of the viability of Afghanistan’s potential mineral wealth are often exaggerated: the extraction

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and marketing of such deep mineral deposits re-quire not only a highly secure working environment, largely corruption-free civil and legal systems, and reliable land tenure; they also require a highly de-veloped industrial infrastructure of paved roads and modern railways, huge amounts of electrical power and water, large-scale worker housing and sanitation, and very expensive deep extraction technologies and equipment, none of which Afghanistan has today or is going to have for decades.

Where there are no easily extractable resources such as opium, marijuana, timber, lapis lazuli, and cultural artifacts, the control of the border cross-ings themselves provides a major source of revenue from bribes, fees, and “taxes.” Warlord militias and the various Taliban groups regularly contest these scant border revenue sources, often reaching local ac-cords to divide the spoils, little of which ever reaches government coffers.194

Additionally, in Pashtun areas in particular, there are hundreds of ongoing feuds between clans like the Mashwari and the Salazai, many of which have re-sulted in false intelligence reports intended to bring about American military action against rivals. In the early years of the U.S.-Afghan war, the United States too easily fell victim to these scams, in one case in 2002 attacking the compound of a district governor in Uru-zgan province allied with the United States and kill-ing dozens of Afghan policemen and senior political leaders in hand-to-hand combat.195 Many local feuds have been going on for decades, often preventing any kind of productive economic activity on the lands be-longing to the warring families from perpetual fear of attacks by war parties and snipers. Some Pashtun clans, like the Mashwaris, Tanais, and Zadrans, do

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have long-standing animosity against tribes that sup-port the Taliban, resulting in protracted local armed conflict between them, but, geographically and politi-cally, they are few and far between. Frequently, sev-eral of these different types of conflicts overlap one another with an admixture of fighting motivations.

But by far the single greatest source of conflict in Afghan society is the millennium-old animosity be-tween the Dari- and Uzbek-speaking northern eth-nic groups and the Pashtu-speaking southern ethnic groups (including the Pashai196). Determining iden-tity in Afghanistan, of course, is not as simplistic as many newly minted “cultural experts” employed by the military suggest.197 In many cases, prevailing no-tions of ethnicity and identity in Afghanistan today were imported by the Americans themselves. Afghans in general do not identify themselves solely by a sin-gle ethnic label per se, any more than Americans do. Many communities are a mixture of villagers from different ethnic origins, often intermarried, and mul-tilingualism is a part of day-to-day life.198 Yet, broadly speaking, the political divide between Dari speakers and Pashtu speakers, often intertwined with disputes over land, water, religion, and resources, remains the largest obstacle to a sense of national identity and na-tion-building, a critical factor that will be discussed in detail in Part II.

It is this animus and chasm of trust between north and south, in general terms, that has driven the Af-ghan civil war since 1973 and will determine Afghani-stan’s fate in the next 5 years. The beginnings of the chaos and collapse of Afghan society which began 40 years ago can be traced directly to the bloodless overthrow of (Pashtun) Afghan King Zahir Shah by his cousin, Mohammed Daud, in 1973. Daud did not

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attempt to take the throne himself: rather, he seized power and attempted to rule the country without a king. The Afghan civil war began soon thereafter, and continues to this day. In Afghanistan, the existence of a king has not always been accompanied by peace, but the absence of a king has always been accompanied by war.

All of the events of the last 40 years in Afghani-stan can be understood via this paradigm. The failed experiment with communism, which provoked Soviet intervention in 1979, was largely an outcome of a pow-er struggle between the mostly Tajik Parcham faction and the predominantly Pashtun Khalq faction of the communist party of Afghanistan, the People’s Demo-cratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA).199 The PDPA split into these two main camps in 1967, but was still strong enough in 1973 to help Daud overthrow his cousin, King Zahir Shah. Daud’s rule was brief, however. With help from the Afghan Army, the PDPA overthrew and killed Daud and his family in April 1978 in what is known as the Saur (April) Revolution, and estab-lished a communist government led by Ghilzai Pash-tun Nur Mohammed Taraki and the Khalq faction.200 In 1979, with the help of Soviet Spetznaz commandos, the Parchami faction overthrew the Khalqi faction and killed then (Ghilzai Pashtun) President Hafizullah Amin. The Parchami Tajik leader Babrak Karmal was installed as President.201

The PDPA, as subsequently reconciled by the So-viets, was supposed to be a government of national unity, with power shared between Pashtuns and Ta-jiks, but it remained deeply riven into these two ethnic power blocs. The PDPA began to implement unpopu-lar reforms. It attempted to eliminate religion and car-ry out sweeping land reform in the rural areas in order

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to redistribute farmlands confiscated from the land-lord class to the feudal peasant farmers who worked them. These measures sparked an armed conservative backlash led by rural landowners and rural mullahs protecting their respective turfs, and for a variety of political economic reasons, the peasant sharecrop-ping farmers who stood to gain the most from land reform instead backed their landlords. The PDPA also attempted such equally radical social reforms in the 1970s such as allowing women to participate in pub-lic and political life, which shocked the conservative Afghan people.

The 10-year war that followed is commonly and wrongly presented as the “Soviet-Afghan” war, in which the Soviets are portrayed as fighting alone against heroic mujahideen fighters bravely repelling the invaders. The absurdly ahistorical 2007 Hollywood film Charlie Wilson’s War, for example, is a classic of this genre.202 Such myths are a part of every country’s narrative, but the war was, in fact, nothing of the sort. In reality, the Soviets allied with a significant propor-tion of northern Afghans from the Tajik, Uzbek, and Hazara ethnic groups to fight the largely Pashtun mujahideen.

All major Afghan ethnicities (except the Shi’a Hazaras) were represented among the “Peshawar Seven,” the seven mujahideen parties formed and recognized by the Pakistani Army via the Inter Ser-vices Intelligence Directorate (ISI), which armed them with weapons provided by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and paid them with money provided by the intelligence service of Saudi Arabia.203 Only Iran supported the Hazara resistance groups, under the umbrella of the Hizb-e Wahdat-e Islami Afghanistan.204 In reality, however, the great bulk of the support (by ISI design) went to Pashtun groups, and actual resis-

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tance was largely carried out by Pashtuns (when they were not killing each other, a specialty of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and his Hizb-i-Islami Gulbuddin, or HiG205). It was the Pashtuns who bore the brunt of the geno-cidal Soviet “drain-the-swamp” tactics.206 The Soviets destroyed thousands of Pashtun villages and mas-sacred as many as a million Pashtuns between 1979 and 1989.207

Of course, there were notable exceptions. The leg-endary Tajik mujahideen leader Ahmed Shah Masood, for example, was known as the “Lion of the Panshir.”208 Masood fought off countless Soviet offensives into the Panshir Valley north of the Soviet airbase at Bagram and subsequently led the last elements of resistance to the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan in 2001.209

Nevertheless, a large proportion of the fighting against the mujahideen was carried out by the con-script Afghan Army loyal to the PDPA and its Soviet advisors. Before the Soviet incursion, the (conscript) Afghan Army consisted of:

. . . three armored divisions (570 medium tanks), eight infantry divisions (averaging 4,500 to 8,000 men each), two mountain infantry brigades, one artillery brigade, a guards regiment (for palace protection), three artillery regiments, two commando regiments, and a parachute battalion (largely grounded). All the formations were under the control of three corps level headquarters.210

After the Soviet occupation, significant parts of the Afghan Army deserted, but it remained in combat as an almost entirely Dari-speaking conscription force until the end of the war. Attrition through desertion was a constant problem, but it was never as high as the levels of desertion from the all-volunteer ANA today.211 The communist Afghan Air Force was large

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and capable, operating a variety of aircraft, including 240 fighter jets, among them three squadrons of MIG-21s. In fact, the current Commander of the ANAF, Lieutenant General Mohammad Dawran (a Tajik), flew against the mujahideen, compiling more than 2,000 cockpit hours in the MIG-21 and being trained as a cosmonaut by the Soviets.212 Dispelling this mythos of the Soviet period as a “war of national liberation” is essential to understanding Afghanistan today in the context of the ongoing civil war. The Soviet period from 1979 to 1989 was, in fact, simply another chapter in the 40-year civil war between north and south.

After a protracted period of anarchy, character-ized by an ethnic free-for-all, and created by ethni-cally based warlord armies vying for power following the Soviet withdrawal, the Taliban period from 1996 to 2001 was a continuation of the north-south civil war. The Taliban was, and is, a virtually 100 percent Pashtun movement, and resistance to it, apart from a handful of dissident Pashtun clans mentioned earlier, took the form of a Dari- and Uzbek-speaking resis-tance movement known as the Northern Alliance. It was comprised of Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazaras, and Turk-men. The Northern Alliance gradually lost ground and retreated stubbornly in the face of the Pakistani Army-equipped and advised Taliban army. Pakistani advisors operated with the Taliban on the ground, and Pakistani Air Force pilots flew for the Taliban against the Northern Alliance.213 The infamous “Op-eration Evil Airlift” out of Kunduz in November 2001, in which hundreds of senior Taliban and al-Qaeda leaders were airlifted out of the Kunduz Pocket to Peshawar in blacked-out Pakistani Air Force cargo aircraft under a secret agreement with the George W. Bush administration, was conducted as a face-saving measure for then-Pakistani President Pervez

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Musharraf.214 The airlift was intended to allow Mush-arraf to evacuate the hundreds of Pakistani Army ad-visors trapped in the Kunduz Pocket, and thus spare him the international embarrassment of revealing the Pakistani Army’s blatant role in supporting and sup-plying the Taliban.215 The ISI naturally used the op-portunity to get its Afghan Taliban and al-Qaeda lead-ership out at the same time.216 In fact, the Taliban, then as today, operates as a de facto expeditionary division of the Pakistan Army, run by the army's intelligence branch, the ISI.217

The two primary points here are that the various military groups comprising the Taliban, including the Quetta Shura group, the Haqqani Network, HiG, the Tora Bora front, Hizb-i-Islami Khalis, and others, are almost 100 percent ethnically Pashtuns, and that the Afghan Taliban, the Haqqani Network, HiG, and so on were, and are, a de facto extension of the Pakistani Army that is trained, equipped, supplied, advised, and given refuge and medical care by the Pakistani government, as Admiral Mike Mullen noted in 2011.218 The rationale for this on the part of Pakistan remains Pakistan’s strategic shibboleth, “security in depth,” which requires Pakistan to maintain proxy control over Afghanistan in order to keep India off of its northern flank and avoid its psychological bête noir, a hypothet-ical two-front war with India.219 Some observers inter-pret the ongoing war in Afghanistan almost exclusive-ly as an extension of this dynamic. “Fundamentally, the war in Afghanistan is an Indo-Pakistan proxy conflict layered atop Afghanistan’s ethnic cleavages,” Thomas Lynch of the National Defense University’s Institute for National Strategic Studies has argued. “In this decades-old struggle, NATO counterinsurgency forces are but a temporary participant.”220

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In 2001, following the attacks of September 11, the United States allied itself with the Northern Alliance and stepped into this ongoing north-south civil war, either without comprehending this context or ignor-ing it. The reemergence of the Taliban in late-2002, in the form of an incipient insurgency,221 its rise from the ashes to control large swathes of rural Afghanistan, the power struggles within the kleptocratic Karzai administration,222 the recent electoral conflict between the Pashtun Ashraf Ghani and the Tajik Abdullah Abdullah,223 and the 4-month delay in even nominat-ing a cabinet are all further manifestations of this civil war. Now that the United States is departing Afghani-stan, it is once again heating up. Taliban attacks spiked in 2014, and the largely Tajik Afghan National Army and the locally recruited Afghan National Police both suffered casualties that reached record highs during the year.224

Ashraf Ghani, who was pronounced the winner despite “industrial-scale” electoral fraud,225 actually has very little overall support among the people.226 Barely a third of eligible voters cast legitimate bal-lots in the two elections of 2014, meaning that, at best, Ghani has the active support of one-half of one-third of the population, or perhaps 18 percent, since the out-come of the voting was presented as a nearly 50-50 split.227 According to surveys conducted by the Asia Foundation in 2013, the Taliban has the support of ap-proximately a third of the Afghan people today.228

Thus approximately one-third of the Afghan people cared enough to vote for one candidate or the other in the elections of 2014, one-third sup-port the Taliban, and one-third simply want to be left alone or are entirely apathetic to their future.

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Figure 1. PDPA Force Size from 1978 to 1989.

In other words, of the one-third who cared enough to vote in 2014, roughly half supported President Ashraf Ghani, the great majority of them being Pashtuns. The Afghan government today, a shotgun marriage of north and south following the bitterly contested election audit process, is an extra-constitutional “gov-ernment of national unity” in which the fault lines between Ghani’s supporters among the anti-Taliban Pashtun, including many former Khalkis like Moham-med Afzal Lodin229 and Shah Nawaz Tanai,230 and the Tajik supporters of Abdullah Abdullah, who include

AFGHAN COMMUNIST ARMYYEAR ARMY AIR FORCE PARAMIL1978 80-90,000 10,0001979 50-100,000 5,0001980 20-25,0001981 25-35,0001982 25-40,0001983 35-40,000 5-7,0001984 35-40,0001985 35-40,000 7,000 50,0001986 40,000 60,0001987 70,0001988 80,0001989 100,000

Numbers are incomplete but some may be extropolated. In the final years of the war, the Soviets also attempted to raise irregular units like the ALP. The Soviets also had trouble with “green on red” attacks, and came to rely heavily on the Afghan Commando Brigades (444th, 37th, and 38th) toward the end of the war, just as U.S. SF and SOF rely heavily on them today. Attrition from the all-conscript communist army was lower than that of the ANA today.

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the second most powerful man in Afghanistan, Mo-hammed Atta,231 are already beginning to appear.232 Today’s “government of national unity” cobbled to-gether by the United States not only resembles the PDPA “government of national unity” cobbled to-gether by the Soviet Union in 1979, but it also features many of the same cast of characters. The new Minster of the Interior, for example, Nur ul-Haq Ulumi, was a Parcham member of the PDPA.233 Only a third of the “government of national unity” ministerial choices were accepted by the Wolesi Jirga.234 Meanwhile, ap-parently not fully grasping the Afghan Constitution’s prohibition of elected leaders having private militias, First Vice President of Afghanistan and former PDPA officer Rashid Dostum235 spent the month of Decem-ber 2014 resurrecting his private 20,000-man Junbish (Uzbek) militia to “root out Taliban” from Kunduz province.236

Picture I-10. Ghani Supporters Mohammed Afzal Lodia, Shah Nawaz Tanai, and Nur ul-Haq Ulumi.

Former communist party members are prominent among Ghani supporters. Khalqi general Mohammed Afzal Lodin, left, is a leading Ghani supporter and was briefly his nominee for Minister of Defense. Shah Nawaz Tanai of Khost province, center (seen here wearing his Khalqi general's uniform in his 2014 presiden-tial campaign poster) was the Chief of Staff of the Army under Najibullah. Nur ul-Haq Ulumi, right, former prominent Parchami faction member and Lieutenant General in the communist army, is now the Minister of the Interior.

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ATTRITION: THE FORCE KILLER

Returning now to the Afghan security forces, hav-ing situated them within this broader context of the ongoing ethnic civil war, what follows is an explica-tion of their operational problems. The first of these are force size, force maturity, combat experience, and attrition.

National Military Training Center-Afghanistan (NMTC-A)/Combined Security Transition Com-mand-Afghanistan (CSTC-A) deliberately obscured these statistics for years by reporting only the “trained and equipped” numbers and refusing to share the statistics with the State Department and other govern-ment agencies.237 According to SIGAR, the reported strength of the ANA as of January 2014 was 149,185 men, not counting civilians and “Trainee, Transient, Holdee, and Student” numbers.238 In a rare moment of ISAF candor, on December 11, 2014, Lieutenant General Anderson told Reuters news agency that 20 percent of the 195,000 authorized ANA billets are currently unfilled because “recruiting and retention aren’t matching, and, of course, don’t forget losses,” indicating a total strength in December 2014 of 156,000 men, including the approximately 6,000 personnel of the ANAF.239 This number tallies with the first quarter 2014 SIGAR report figure (149,185, not including the ANAF) and may be considered reliable.

According to U.S. Government figures, during the 12-month period of September 2012 to September 2013, the ANA lost 67,682 men to attrition. British gov-ernment figures are comparable. As reported by The Independent in 2013:

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the latest British Government assessments . . . con-firm that the rate of recruits leaving is far worse than targets set by coalition leaders, amounting to 63,000 every year, or more than a third of the current size of the army.240

Using SIGAR’s 2014 figures of 149,185 men actu-ally wearing uniforms and on the rosters,241 the loss of 67,682 men in a year to desertion represents 45 percent of the entire army. The ANA recruited only 64,383 new soldiers during the same period.242 Only about 54,000 of them made it through the mild basic training course, because the basic training dropout rate is 16 percent.243 Thus, the ANA lost some 13,600 more men than it could recruit in the year between September 2012 and September 2013. (In comparison, the all-con-script ARVN suffered 20 percent attrition in 1973,244 and the all-conscript Afghan Army fighting with the Soviets against the mujahideen never had more than 35 percent attrition.245) Recruiting statistics are hard to come by and are now classified, but there were sev-eral months in 2013 in which the ANA did not meet its recruiting goals,246 and Lieutenant General Ander-son’s observations on December 11, 2014, indicate a 20 percent recruiting shortfall in 2014.247 This suggests that not only has the number of recruits which can be found annually reached its maximum level and is starting to decline (in a country with 50 percent un-employment248), but also that the maximum recruiting level is now below the current level of annual attri-tion, and the ANA is shrinking. At a minimum, what can be said with certainty is that the ANA has reached its maximum possible size at roughly 150,000 men.

In point of fact, no one knows exactly how many soldiers and policemen are actually present for duty

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on any given day. The precise figures given lend a false sense of credibility and confidence in numbers which are, in actuality, mostly estimates. Personnel accountability in the ANSF, and in the police in par-ticular, is in its infancy. ISAF is almost entirely reli-ant on Ministry of Defense (MOD) and MOI reports of force size, so, although the United States pays the salaries of every soldier and policeman the MOD and MOI say are present, we do not have any granularity on ANSF numbers because western personnel liter-ally never count them. As the DoD Inspector General reported in August 2014:

the [government of Afghanistan] lacked the basic con-trols to provide reasonable assurance that it appro-priately spent $3.3 billion of ASFF [Afghan Security Forces Fund] direct contributions. . . . As a result of [the government of Afghanistan’s] internal control weaknesses, CSTC-A cannot verify that the ASFF direct contributions were properly spent or used for their intended purposes.249

SIGAR added in 2013 that:

Determining ANSF strength is fraught with chal-lenges. U.S. and coalition forces rely on the Afghan forces to report their own personnel strength num-bers. Moreover, the . . . CSTC-A noted that, in the case of the [ANA], there is ‘no viable method of validating [their] personnel numbers’.250

Unlike western armies, Afghan soldiers and po-licemen routinely “self-transfer” to other units for personal and ethnic reasons. Maintaining “ghost sol-diers” on the rolls is an entrenched Afghan military tradition that allows commanders to report imaginary men in order to receive extra bulk rations that are sold on the grey market to supplement their meager officer

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salaries. In December 2014, it was reported that the Iraqi government of Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi had discovered the presence of 50,000 such “ghost sol-diers” on the roles of the Iraqi Army as well.251 Gius-tozzi notes that payment of ANA salaries by electronic funds transfers and the presence of U.S. combat advi-sors kept a lid on ghost soldiering in the ANA, but with the advisors now gone, there are no formal struc-tures within the ANA to prevent it from increasing.252

Behind the smoke and mirrors surrounding the doctrinally already inadequate 149,185 ANA force size number cited by SIGAR and Lieutenant General Anderson (not counting the 6,000 man air force),253 the reality is sobering. Of the reported total “assigned strength” of the ANA of 149,185, only 119,485 men are designated as combat-assigned troops (the six Corps commands, the Commandos, and the Kabul 111 [static garrison and parade] Division). The remaining 30,000 are rear area staff and headquarters personnel. Of this 119,485, SIGAR found that a further 9,000 men who were still on the books and counted as “assigned” were actually deserters not yet removed from the rolls, another 15,915 were still in basic training or on ad-ministrative hold,254 and 9,236 were civilians.255 Thus 34,151 men “assigned” to the combat forces were not in them, or were not even soldiers—almost 30 percent. This does not include men on authorized leave.

To determine the “not present plus authorized leave” number and calculate the actual fighting strength of the ANA, SIGAR’s statistics from the pre-vious 12 months can be used. SIGAR found at the be-ginning of 2012 that out of the (then) strength of the ANA on paper of 176,354, only 63 percent were actu-ally present for duty.256 Thus the “not present” plus “authorized leave” number equals roughly 37 percent of the assigned number.

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Using this statistic of 37 percent as an approximate relative constant, of the 119,485 who were assigned to combat commands in December 2014 (the six ANA Army Corps, the 111th Capital Division, and the com-mandos) only 75,258 soldiers were actually in fighting units and present for duty.257 This is the real fighting strength of the ANA. Only 41 percent of the big ANA number are actual soldiers actually present in combat units. In other words, cutting through the smoke and mirrors, SIGAR found that ISAF was routinely count-ing deserters, civilians, recruits in basic training, the sick, the halt, the lame, the wounded, men on leave, and rear echelon clerks and generals as “trained and equipped” or “assigned” to make the end strength number appear larger, the ANA appear more ready, and the ANA program appear more successful.258 The reality is that, in all of Afghanistan, there are only about 75,000 soldiers actually out there with guns in their hands, or one for every 3.4 square miles of the country. The comparable actual fighting strength of the police in the field is 53,500.

In addition, despite the bar being constantly low-ered by ISAF for this metric,259 there are still only a handful of ANA battalions rated as being able to op-erate entirely without U.S. advisors or support.260 In April, 2013, a force of over 200 Taliban attacked one of them, the Third Battalion, Second Brigade, 201 Corps, in Nari district of Kunar province, wiped out the en-tire garrison of 13 men, and captured the outpost.261 In contrast, from 1971 on, the entire ARVN operated without U.S. advisors or support. At the time of pub-lication, the extent of possible future analysis of the ANA personnel situation is unclear, because while Operation RESOLUTE SUPPORT is walking back its much-criticized262 unilateral263 decision to classify ANA personnel and readiness numbers,264 which data

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will remain classified is still unknown. If the numbers were good, however, it seems unlikely they would been classified in the first place after 6 years of open publication.

Moreover, attrition is not constant across the force. It is understandably much higher in combat units in the south than in comfortable rear area staff positions in major cities, or in corps in the north that are not regularly engaged in fighting. Attrition from the 205 Corps operating in Kandahar, Uruzgan, and Daykun-di provinces in 2014 was 42 percent.265 In the summer of 2014, the 2nd Brigade of the ANA’s 215 Corps op-erating in northern Helmand suffered 70 percent at-trition.266 (The U.S. Army rates a unit as “combat in-effective” when its personnel strength declines to 50 percent.267) In 2014, there were approximately 25,500 men in these two Corps (205 and 215), and about 13,000 of them deserted. In contrast, the highest rate of attrition experienced by the conscript Afghan Army fighting with the Soviets against the mujahideen was about 35 percent,268 while attrition from the conscript ARVN in 1973 was about 20 percent.269 Thus, the all-volunteer ANA has double the desertion rate of the all-conscript ARVN, not a good indicator of its fight-ing spirit. In short, the combat element of the ANA is about 75,258 men, fully half of whom have been in the army less than 12 months. How would U.S. Army officers evaluate the U.S. Army if half of it deserted every year and half of the remainder had been in the Army less than 12 months?

Casualties, another source of attrition, have also risen alarmingly. Approximately 4,000 ANA soldiers have been killed in action in the last 34 months.270 In fact, casualties are at an all-time high and rising.271 Lieutenant General Anderson described these casu-alty figures in November 2014 as “not sustainable,”

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noting that the ANSF (Army and Police) have suf-fered 9,000 KIA since the beginning of 2013.272 In 2012, 1,170 ANA soldiers were killed in action or died of their wounds,273 by 2013 the number had risen to 1,400 soldiers,274 and in the first 6 months of 2014, ap-proximately 950 soldiers died.275 (Almost 3,000 ANP personnel were killed in 2013 alone, and some 3,500 died in the first 10 months of 2014.276) The numbers of ANSF personnel wounded in action (WIA) and no longer present for duty are very difficult to acquire; apparently the ANA and ANP either do not keep close records of the numbers of personnel wounded or do not regularly release them to the public. In February 2013, the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University put the number of Afghan military and police WIA at 30,471, “estimated using the com-mon ratio for other conflicts of three soldiers wounded for every one killed.”277

Using this formula, in addition to 4,000 ANA sol-diers KIA in the previous 34 months, another 12,000 have been WIA. SIGAR reported that between March 2012 and February 2014, the ANA had 2,166 person-nel KIA and 11,804 WIA, an actual wounded-to-killed ratio of 5.4-to-1, so the common 3:1 ratio may be much too low.278 Using the SIGAR 5.4-to-1 ratio as a relative constant and Lieutenant General Anderson’s figures, in addition to 9,000 overall ANSF KIA since the begin-ning of 2013, another 48,600 have been wounded.279 Some 57,600 combat casualties (KIA plus WIA) in 2 years, not counting missing in action (MIAs) and pris-oners of war (POWs) or losses from disease and non-combat related injuries, represents almost 45 percent of the entire present-for-duty combat fighting strength of the ANSF of 128,500, a staggering statistic. (In com-parison, in the 4 years of World War II, 6 percent of all Americans who served in uniform were killed or

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wounded.280) Perhaps most importantly from a stra-tegic viewpoint, during 2013, the Taliban suffered an estimated 10,000 to 12,000 men killed, wounded, and captured. During the same period, ANSF casualties (ANA plus ANP killed and wounded) were 20,960. In other words, in 2013, Afghan government secu-rity forces suffered two casualties for every one they inflicted on the enemy.281

Figure 2. ANA Casualties from 2002 to 2014.

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THE ETHNIC TIME BOMB

The ANA has one other major, largely hidden problem that is not often discussed, at least not pub-licly: It is largely a Northern Alliance army. The dan-ger is that the heavily Tajik ANA is being portrayed by the Taliban as “an occupying power in the south,” as U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham (Republican, South Carolina) noted in June 2014.282 A similar dynamic was in play when the Sunni terrorist group known as ISIS attacked Mosul. The Shia-dominated Iraqi Army in Mosul abandoned the city rapidly in June 2014.283

Statistical analysis proves conclusively that the routinely presented ANA ethnic balance numbers simply are not accurate. The boilerplate numbers of approximately 43 percent Pashtuns and 35 percent Tajiks coincide precisely with what is known as the “Eikenberry Rule,”284 guidelines promulgated by Lieu-tenant General Karl Eikenberry during his first tour in Afghanistan from September 2002 to September 2003, when he served as both the U.S. Security Coordina-tor for Afghanistan and as Chief of the Office of Mili-tary Cooperation-Afghanistan.285 The Eikenberry Rule stipulates that the ethnic mix of the ANA will closely mirror that of Afghan society, so that it will not be per-ceived as the army of one or the other of the country’s major ethnic groups so that it will serve as a symbol of national unity.286 In fact, the reported ethnic mix of the ANA today is, astonishingly, a perfect mirror of Afghan society that precisely reflects the Eikenberry Rule—not close, or somewhat imbalanced, as is, for example, the U.S. Army, but perfect.

However, this is not only ipso facto suspicious, but there is substantial anecdotal and statistical evidence that it is not true. The Pashtun presence in the ANA

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is being exaggerated, and to understand how, some understanding of the ethnic group is necessary. The Pashtuns in Afghanistan are not one monolithic peo-ple, but a large, segmentary descent group compris-ing more than 350 major independent tribes,287 each one, in a strictly demographic, organizational sense, roughly analogous to a Native American tribe such as the Apache, Navajo, Sioux, Comanche, and so on. Determining who is a Pashtun and who is not is not always simple: some Pashtuns pretend they are not and speak Dari, while some clans are not ethnically Pashtun but speak Pashto and claim to be Pashtun.

In general terms, the Pashtuns are classified by academic experts into four major tribal groups that have a substantial presence in Afghanistan, and a fifth group that lives almost entirely in Pakistan.288 The “Eastern Pashtuns” of Afghanistan live in the area around Jalalabad and are comprised of scores of tribes known collectively as the Sarbani as a result of their ancestral claims.289 Former Afghan President Hamid Karzai is from the “Western Pashtun” tribal group, known to ethnographers as the Durrani or Ab-dali group. The kings of Afghanistan and their courts were virtually all descended from this tribal group. They reside primarily in the area around Kandahar. In the same southern region are found the third tribal grouping, the Ghilzai or Bitani group,290 traditional ri-vals of the Durranis. The deepest rivalry among the Ghilzai is between the two major tribes, the Hotaki and the Ahmadzai. Taliban founder Mullah Omar is from the Hotaki tribe, and Afghan president Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai is from the Ahmadzai tribe.291 Much of the original inner core element of the original Taliban movement were Hotakis.292 Afghan president Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai draws his support base from among the Ahmadzais, including many former members of

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the Khalq faction of the PDPA. The U.S. military er-roneously aggregates these two tribal groups together under the rubric of the “Southern Pashtuns,” a spu-rious classification that has no ethnographic basis or academic validity beyond a broad geographic descrip-tion of where they live.

Map I-2. ANA Corps Commands.

The fourth major tribal grouping are the Karlanri (putatively descended from another son of the ur-an-cestor of the Pashtuns293 named Karlan294). They are re-ferred to often as the “hill tribes,” the rough mountain men and women who most closely hold to the old tribal traditions and laws. They live in the inhospitable and often barren mountains of south-central Afghanistan. Many of them live across the largely imaginary Du-rand Line in the tribal areas of northern Pakistan (the Federally Administered Tribal Areas). The Karlanri are the Appalachian mountaineers of Afghanistan—

Source: Map courtesy of The Long War Journal.

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they avoid all contact with any government, Afghan or Pakistani. For this reason, virtually none of them may be found in the ranks of the ANA, although some served as scouts in former British times in irregular formations like the Khyber Rifles.295

In rough terms, the Pashtun population of Af-ghanistan then could be said to be comprised of ap-proximately equal numbers of each group, with the Durrani and Ghilzai groups (the latter generally but not entirely includes the nomadic Kuchi Pashtuns296) comprising some 25 percent each, the Sarbani Pashtuns forming perhaps 30 percent of the whole, and the hill tribes making up roughly another 20 percent. Since they have never been counted, these are only rough but reasonable estimates based on data collected by Louis Adamec, Louis Dupree, and Henry Priestly.297 This is important because it is critical to getting at who among them are in the ANA.

NMTC-A/CTSC-A statistics indicate that only 3 percent of the ANA comes from the southern prov-inces inhabited by the Durrani and Ghilzai Pashtuns, i.e., “southern Pashtuns.”298 The Wall Street Journal reported in September 2010 that:

southern Pashtuns accounted for . . . 1.1 percent [of ANA recruits] in July [2010] and 1.8 percent in August [2010]. Last month [August 2010], just 66 of the 3,708 Afghan recruits were Pashtuns, U.S. officials said.299

This is not surprising: The Durrani historically have never participated in any Afghan army; almost in the social sense that the once-rigid caste system in India determined which occupation a given caste would perform, the Durrani did not enter military ser-vice. Correspondingly, as much of the support for the Taliban comes from the Ghilzai tribes, their formerly-

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strong participation in the old royal Afghan Army of the 1960s can now be expected to be rather low. In the king’s time, the Afghan Army officer corps was the sinecure of the Ghilzai,300 who have a traditional repu-tation as fighters, but that is no longer the case.

Since the Karlanri generally do not participate in any government institutions, including the police or the army, in any statistically meaningful numbers301 and the misnomered Southern Pashtuns (the Durrani and Ghilzai tribal groups) are providing only 3 per-cent of the force according to NMTC-A statistics,302 this requires, mathematically, that the Eastern or Sar-bani Pashtuns are supplying 40 percent of the ANA.303 This is, at best, dubious. Nangarhar has been the most fertile recruiting ground for the ANA since its incep-tion,304 but the contention that two of four major tribal groups (the Durrani and Ghilzai groups) are together providing 3 percent,305 the third group (the Karlanri) are essentially providing none, and the fourth (the Eastern, or Sarbani Pashtuns), who comprise roughly 12 percent of the overall Afghan population, would therefore be providing 40 percent of the entire army would require credulity bordering on a “suspension of disbelief.”306

Instead, to increase the numbers, ISAF decided in 2006 to include so-called “northern Pashtuns.”307 This demographic segment of Afghan society is theo-retically comprised of the detribalized descendants of several tens of thousands of Pashtuns forced to leave their homes more than a century ago by Abdul Rahman Khan, the ruler of Afghanistan from 1880 to 1901.308 Mostly intermixed and intermarried with northern ethnic groups for more than 100 years, most of these people today are only Pashtuns in a narrow genealogical sense. In many cases, they no longer speak Pashto. However, testifying before the Defense

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Committee of the House of Commons, Evening Stan-dard defense correspondent Robert Fox reported in 2013 that “the disproportionate element [of the ANA] among the Pashtuns are the northern Pashtuns.”309

Picture I-11. Ethnicities of Afghan Commanders.

Major General Zalmai WesaEthnicity: PashtunCommander 209th Corps MAZARAs of: 10/14Major General Abdul HamidEthnicity: PashtunCommander 205th Corps KANDAHARAs of: 11/14Major General Mohammad Zaman WaziriEthnicity: PashtumCommander 201 Corps KABULAs of: 10/14Major General Sharif YaftaliEthnicity: TajikCommader 203 Corps GARDEZAs of: 8/14Major General Taj Mohammad ZahidEthnicity: TajikCommander 207 Corps HERATAs of : 9/14Brigadier General Dadan LawangEthnicity: TajikCommander 215 Corps, LASHKAR GAHAs of: 12/14Major Genral Mohammed DawranEthnicity: TajikCommander Afghan National Air CorpsAs of: 12/14Major General Samin QademshaEthnicity: TajikCommander 111 Division (Kabul Garrison)As of: 12/14

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More importantly, in terms of actual numbers, many Afghans of Pashtun and mixed-Pashtun heri-tage in the north were persecuted for their Pashtun roots despite the fact that they had almost unanimous-ly allied themselves with their Northern Alliance neighbors in 2001 following the fall of the Taliban (another ugly dimension of the ongoing civil war).310 In the face of coercive ethnic cleansing, many fled to the south and to Pakistan refugee camps in the fol-lowing years. This flood of refugees left behind a very small military recruiting pool. Furthermore, the entire fighting age male population of this invented ethnic group remaining in northern Afghanistan in 2014 is likely smaller than the entire ANA today. Most criti-cally, after their persecution beginning in 2002, few feel any affinity any longer for their former Northern Alliance allies and are more likely to be aiding the Tal-iban in the north than fighting them.311 As Brookings Institute noted in 2011, “The Taliban has been rather effectively mobilizing among the northern Pashtuns who feel discriminated by Tajiks.”312 As a result, there are probably more Turkmen in Afghanistan and more Turkmen in the Afghan National Army today than so-called Northern Pashtuns. Counting them as Pashtuns in the ANA is intellectually dishonest at best; counting them as being in large numbers in the ANA is plain dishonest.

In fact, there is substantial anecdotal evidence that Pashtuns comprise only a small fraction of the ANA, and the Eikenberry Rule is a fig leaf that remains in place for propaganda purposes. Ben Anderson, who has been reporting on the ANA for nearly a decade, reported in 2013 that “It’s an exaggeration to call this a national army. It’s not. It’s the Northern Alliance.” Noting the photos of Masood and Dostum taped in

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most of the ANA vehicle windows in Helmand prov-ince, Anderson says, “These guys look almost as foreign to the Pashtuns as we do.”313 Former British Ambassador Craig Murray recounts a conversation with a senior British officer in the CTSC-A program in 2010 as saying the ANA is now over 60 percent Tajik. “The Pashtun figure is hovering below 20 percent and may have been overtaken by the Uzbeks,” according to Ambassador Murray.314 Indeed, a substantial num-ber of Hazaras have also joined the army as a way out of the menial labor jobs most often open to them in Afghan society. Visual evidence corroborates this. The author saw many Hazaras but few Pashtuns in the Kandaks operating in Paktika province during his service in Afghanistan. In fact, Tajiks, Uzbeks, Haz-aras, and Pashtuns are usually quite easy to distin-guish from one another for an experienced observer (any Afghan recognizes it instantly), and in photos and videos of the ANA, it is difficult to spot a Pashtun in the ranks.315 On an operation in April 2012, CNN observed the “Afghan soldiers [were] mostly from the north or northeast of Afghanistan.”316 In 2011 NBC News reported:

The Afghan army tries to ensure a mix of ethnic groups in each brigade of enlisted soldiers, but it is hard to find a brigade that northerners do not dominate. Of the nearly 40 soldiers based with the Americans at Combat Outpost Ware in the Arghandab Valley, only two are Pashtun. One of them is the cook.317

Tajiks are heavily over-represented in the officer ranks as well, especially in operational billets, such as corps commanders. Of the eight most important operational billets, the six regional corps commands, the ANAF Chief of Staff318 (designated as a corps), and

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the 111th (Capital) Division, five are held by Tajiks.319 That represents approximately 63 percent of the top operational commands—almost exactly double their proportion of the Afghan population. During his ten-ure as Minister of Defense, Bismullah Khan packed the mid- and senior-level officer ranks with Tajiks.320 How can the Pashtuns be 43 percent of the army when it is hard to find one in the ranks? As Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous character Sherlock Holmes often noted, “Once you eliminate the impossible, whatev-er remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.”321 The deduction here is obvious: Tajik officers in the MOD mid-levels charged with producing the ethnic balance numbers in accordance with the Eiken-berry Rule to maintain foreign funding are simply falsifying the numbers.

In reality, an educated, well-informed estimate of the representation of Pashtuns in the ANA in early-2015 would be no greater than 15 percent, com-prised of roughly 3 percent southern Pashtuns as reported by NMTC-A, 10 percent eastern Pashtuns (approximately equal to their representation in the general population), and 2 percent northern Pashtuns, Afghans of Pashtun descent born in Pakistani refugee camps, and Pashai.

THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM

The problems of small force size, over-reliance on weak police forces at this late stage of the insurgency, limited mobility, lack of organic CAS and indirect fire support, a virtually nonexistent logistics capability, 40 percent annual ANA attrition and 50 percent an-nual ANP attrition, and severe ethnic imbalance in the ANA are only the most significant of ANSF op-

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erational problems. There is also, for example, a major and growing problem of drug use and drug addiction in both the ANA and the ANP. SIGAR reported the number of ANA soldiers using drugs was “at least 50 percent,” while the figure regularly cited is 75 per-cent,322 and it may be as high as 85 percent of all Af-ghan soldiers, according to some reports.323 As Paul Lacapruccia, who worked on the Border Management Task Force training Afghan border guards at Torkham Gate in 2014, noted: “Afghanistan has hundreds of thousands of armed, uniformed service members who are paid with our aid money. Most of them are illiter-ate drug addicts. I know. I trained them.”324 A video entitled “The Hashish Army—The Afghan National Army” showing an entire ANA unit high on drugs was popular on YouTube in 2009.325 A similar hour-long film by Vice News entitled “This is What Winning Looks Like” showing pervasive ANA and ANP drug use was put online in 2013.326

The real strategic impediment, however, and the elephant in the room, is the inability of the Afghan government to come close to being able to sustain its security forces without international financial dona-tions of some $4.1 billion annually.327 Only $500 mil-lion of the annual costs, or roughly 12 percent, is to be provided by the Afghan government.328 According to World Bank statistics, Afghan government revenues have been declining steadily since 2011.329 The World Bank reported in December 2014 that Afghan eco-nomic growth “collapsed from an average 9.4 percent growth between 2003-2012 to 1.5 percent this year.”330 As the civil war in Afghanistan increases in intensity, further reducing Afghanistan’s already limited appeal to foreign investors, revenue-producing foreign pres-ence and investment will decrease further. Afghan

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government revenues will thus continue to decline, not increase. Afghanistan’s public revenue for 2014 is projected to be U.S.$2.4 billion—half the cost of the ANSF alone.331

In meetings with the author in Kabul beginning in 2001, successive Afghan Ministers of Defense Moham-med Fahim, Rahim Wardak, Bismullah Khan, and the recently nominated and Sandhurst-educated Sher Mo-hammed Karimi (as of February 2015 the Chief of Staff of the ANA), all impressed upon me the unsustain-ability of the all-volunteer force structure of the ANA on which U.S. Army leaders insisted. All previous Afghan armies in history had been conscript armies.332 This was the Afghan way of making armies, and of making them ethnically balanced. “How will we pay for this when you’re gone?” Rahim Wardak asked me in 2002.333 He and other Afghan military leaders knew full well that a professional western-style army would be prohibitively expensive to pay and maintain, and urged our delegation to utilize conscription instead. They agreed unanimously that when U.S. funding eventually ceased, the Afghan government would be forced to switch over to a system of conscription as their only option, and so it may well prove to be. In the meantime, they were content to get what they could in terms of military resources from the United States.

It is unclear what sober and reasoned judgment led the U.S. Army to build an unsustainable, high-tech, and very expensive professional army in its own image in Afghanistan, despite all the polite advice of Afghan military leaders with decades of professional experience operating in one of the most impoverished countries in the world,334 but it was a poor one. Former Special Forces officer Kalev Sepp conducted a seminal study on best practices in counterinsurgency over the

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previous 50 years, identifying commonalities of suc-cess and failure. High on the list in every failed coun-terinsurgency is “building [and] training indigenous army in [the] image of U.S. Army.”335

In simple terms, Afghanistan cannot begin to af-ford its own army today, and even under the most optimistic economic projections for the Afghan economy, it would not be able to do so for decades.336 Events of the next 5 years, however, will render this a moot point.

COUNTERVAILING ARGUMENTS

The most obvious counterargument to the compar-ison of the fates of the ARVN in Vietnam and the ANA in Afghanistan is that the Taliban does not have tanks, and they are not the regular North Vietnamese Army (NVA) with major backing from the Soviet Union and China. The Taliban are irregulars, it is argued, not a conventional force like the NVA, nor can their num-bers begin to approach the strength of the NVA. This is true, as far as it goes, but by the same token the ANA is not the ARVN either, and if the NVA was 15 times more powerful than the Taliban, the ARVN was at least 15 times more powerful than the ANA, while suffering half the attrition from desertions and having a quarter of the terrain to defend. The relative size com-parison is, in fact, quite good. The NVA had the back-ing of the nuclear-armed Soviet Union and nuclear-armed China; the Afghan Taliban, Haqqani Network, HiG, HiK (Hizb-i Islami Khalis), Tora Bora Front, and other jihadi groups have the backing of nuclear-armed Pakistan. The Taliban may not have tanks, but for all intents and purposes, neither does the ANA. Within the 111th Division of the ANA, there is a single tank

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battalion equipped with 44 T-55 and T-62 tanks. Half of them, however, are “hangar queens,” vehicles used for spare parts, and only about 20 can actually run. All are in poor repair; none are less than 40 years old, there are no tank transporters, and the road distance any of them could travel without breaking down is questionable. Ammunition for the main guns is scarce, as are tankers who know how to operate them. Most importantly, there is no concept of combined arms and the use of armor in conjunction with infan-try and artillery in the ANA, let alone any training or experience. Tanks in Afghanistan are a form of line-of-sight, direct-fire artillery, like very big rifles, and when they are used, they are employed statically and individually. The ANA’s 20 tanks are an unreliable parade force.337

On the other hand, the ARVN did have tanks, lots of them, and lots of experience in operating them in a combined arms role.338 In 1970, the ARVN had four brigades of tanks,339 largely M-48 Pattons, which were a proven tactical match for the NVA’s T-55.340 Each ARVN armor brigade headquarters was “highly mobile, track-mounted, packed with radio gear, and manned by a carefully selected, battle-tested staff.”341 The ARVN and the NVA had relative armor parity. Thus, the real comparison is not between the NVA and the Taliban in terms of opposing combat power and external support, it is between the Taliban and the ANA, and in terms of heavy weapons, both are roughly evenly matched. The Taliban vs. the ANA is and will be a light infantry vs. light infantry war (see Appendix II).

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Picture I-12. Taliban Tanks and Humvees.

Arguments about relative force size are also red herrings. To argue that the Taliban has only x number of fighters (and substitute for x with whatever intelli-gence estimate one prefers) is a profound miscompre-hension of the various groups that loosely comprise the Taliban. While the number of men in the ANA basically represents the maximum number it can field, because the maximum annual number of recruits has balanced out with annual attrition, this is not true of the Taliban. The number of fighters in the field today merely represents the number current Taliban leader-ship believes to be appropriate for its current opera-

Top, the Taliban have experience operating tanks, and, increasingly, Humvees, bottom.

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tional goals. In fact, there are hundreds of thousands of young men in northern Pakistan steeped in militant jihad in the radical madrassas which abound in the region, and who are ready and eager to martyr them-selves in jihad in Afghanistan.342 As long as American airpower remains a daily threat, massing such forces would result in mass casualties for little gain, as Tali-ban leadership is keenly aware. But whether the Tali-ban has 20,000 or 30,000 or 23,871 fighters in Afghani-stan today is irrelevant; unlike the ANA, it is able to “surge” quickly and escalate violence rapidly, given logistic support from the Pakistani Army of the type provided from 1996 to 2001. The year 2013 witnessed Taliban forces massing in the hundreds for the first time,343 with more such larger formations in 2014,344 a classic indicator of a late-stage insurgency.345

In addition, the Taliban can rely to a great extent on the “snowball” and “hanger-on” effects of the Afghan Way of War,346 seen so dramatically between 1996 and 2001, in which Taliban forces assimilated fight-ers from overrun local militias into their ranks like a snowball rolling down a hill. This is inevitable with ALP forces; the choice presented in the Afghan Way of War is always “join us or die.”347 Perversely, training and equipping the ALP ultimately may be tantamount to the Taliban outsourcing this function to the United States. From 1996 to 2001, the Taliban also absorbed previously uncommitted young men along the way to national power who suddenly saw benefits in the form of loot, plunder, rapine, food, and especially so-cial prestige from “hanging-on” to the Taliban as it went by. This will certainly happen again in Pashtun areas. The ANA will have neither of these traditional Afghan force generators. Even combat losses today in Helmand are difficult to replace, and it was only

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the insertion of one of the ANA commando battalions into Helmand by air, rather than new replacements, combined with the massive application of U.S. CAS, that stabilized the situation in September and October 2014. Without U.S. airpower, the ANA garrison in the town of Sangin was overrun on November 29, 2014, killing 14 ANA soldiers and leaving another six or seven MIA.348

Furthermore, in the summer of 2014, the highly motivated but lightly armed ISIS in Iraq faced a nu-merically far superior and more heavily armed Iraqi Army, which was equipped with armor and artillery, and rolled over them in a matter of hours. Perhaps as good or better a comparison than NVA vs. ARVN for the future of Afghanistan is ISIS vs. the Iraqi Army.

For the Taliban, analyzing their campaign to regain power in Western terms of the tactical, operational, and strategic levels of war, tactical success might be said to take the form of temporarily overrunning po-lice checkpoints and inflicting steady casualties on the police and army. This they are already achieving on a daily basis. Operational success for the Taliban, al-though they do not think about it in these terms, might be evaluated as briefly capturing a provincial capital, or taking and holding several contiguous district cen-ters, to give themselves a base of uncontested local power. The Taliban extended the traditional fighting season into December in 2014 to achieve this in Hel-mand province. Dr. Abdul Hamidi, the chief of medi-cal services for the ANP in Helmand told The New York Times in mid-December 2014 that “the Quetta Shura has a big push to raise their flags over three districts by January, and has ordered their people to keep fighting until they do.”349 Strategic success for the Taliban in the next 2 years might be described in Western terms

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as perhaps taking and holding an entire province and its provincial capital, from which they could proclaim the return of the “Islamic State of Afghanistan” to Af-ghan soil. This would be an enormous propaganda victory for the Taliban, and a major and demoralizing defeat for the Afghan government. This is unlikely in 2015, but in this sense, the Taliban only has to succeed in one province in 2015 and subsequent years, while the ANA and ANP have to succeed in all 34 provinces. The ANA and ANP must spread themselves out thin-ly and defend the government presence country-wide, while the Taliban can mass and choose the time and place of their attacks. In 2015, as in 2014, the military initiative will be entirely in the hands of the Taliban. In 2015, the Taliban would only need to win one big battle to achieve something akin to strategic success; the security forces need to win them all to prevent it.

ENDNOTES—PART 1

1. Franck Salameh, Language, Memory, and Identity in the Mid-dle East: The Case for Lebanon, Plymouth, UK: Lexington Books, 2010, p. 259.

2. “Why ‘Magical Thinking’ Works for Some People,” Scien-tific American, October 19, 2010, available from www.scientificam-erican.com/article/superstitions-can-make-you/.

3. “Afghanistan Gains Will Be Lost Quickly after Drawdown, U.S. Intelligence Estimate Warns,” The Washington Post, De-cember 28, 2013, available from www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/afghanistan-gains-will-be-lost-quickly-after-draw-down-us-intelligence-estimate-warns/2013/12/28/ac609f90-6f32-11e3-aecc-85cb037b7236_story.html.

4. “Petraeus Tells CIA to Consult Troops on War in Afghani-stan,” Fox News, October 11, 2011, available from www.foxnews.com/world/2011/10/14/petraeus-tells-cia-to-consult-troops-on-war-in-

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afghanistan/; Michael O’Hanlon, “The Intelligence Assessment Is Too Pessimistic about Afghanistan,” The Washington Post, Janu-ary 3, 2014, available from www.mobygroup.com/moby-media-up-date/mmu-archives-2014/1019-mmu-the-intelligence-assessment-is-too-pessimistic-about-afghanistan-03-january-2014.

5. “US Intelligence Report Contradicts Pentagon’s View Re-garding Progress in Afghanistan,” TACSTRAT, Tactical Knowl-edge for Strategic Development, January 17, 2012, available from tacstrat.com/content/index.php/2012/01/17/us-intelligence-report-con-tradicts-pentagons-view-regarding-progress-in-afghanistan/.

6. Ibid.

7. “The Effort To Begin Withdrawing US Military Personnel From Vietnam,” Washington, DC: Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Library, available from https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/books-and-books/cia-and-the-vietnam-policymakers-three-episodes-1962-1968/epis1.html.

8. Scott Plous, The Psychology of Judgment and Decision Making, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1993.

9. Chap. 4, “U.S. and France in Indochina, 1950-56,” The Pen-tagon Papers, Gravel Ed., Vol. 1, Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1971, Sec. 1, pp. 179-214.

10. Musa Khan Jalalzai, Whose Army? Afghanistan’s Future and the Blueprint for Civil War, New York: Algora Publishing, 2014, p. 6.

11. Masato Toriya, “Afghanistan as a Buffer State between Regional Powers in the Late Nineteenth Century: An Analysis of Internal Politics Focusing on the Local Actors and the British Pol-icy,” Regional Powers, Cross-Disciplinary Studies, Sapporo, Ja-pan: Slavic Research Center, Hokkaido University, available from https://src-h.slav.hokudai.ac.jp/rp/publications/no14/14-05_Toriya.pdf.

12. John Seeley, “We seem, as it were, to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind,” The Expansion of England: Two Courses of Lectures, London, UK: MacMillan & Co., 1883, p. 8.

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13. Gertrude Bell, Bahman Maghsoudlou, Grass: Untold Stories, Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers, Inc., 2009, p. 176. Ruth Lapi-doth, “Treaty of Mohammara,” The Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, Vol. 5, The Hague, The Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1982, p. 59.

14. Jeffrey Record, The Wrong War: Why We Lost in Vietnam, Monterey, CA: Naval Institute Press, 1998, Chap. 1.

15. Azam Ahmed, “Hours’ Drive Outside Kabul, Taliban Reign,” The New York Times, November 22, 2014.

16. The former location of Forward Operating Base Todd.

17. “Clash in Badghis Kills 6 ANA,” TOLOnews.com, Decem-ber 2, 2014.

18. “Taliban Overrun an Afghan Army Base,” The New York Times, November 29, 2014.

19. “Guide to the Analysis of Insurgency,” Washington, DC: CIA, released January 5, 2009, p. 11.

20. Walter Capps, ed., The Vietnam Reader, New York: Rout-ledge, 1991, p. 106.

21. Historical Division of the Joint Secretariat, The History of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: The Joint Chiefs of Staff and the War in Vietnam 1969-1970, Washington, DC: Joint Chiefs of Staff, 1976, p. 207.

22. “South Vietnam—Civil Self-Defense Force /People’s Self-Defense Force,” GlobalSecurity.org, available from www.globalsecu-rity.org/military/world/vietnam/rvn-self-defense-force.htm.

23. The History of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: The Joint Chiefs of Staff and the War in Vietnam 1969-1970, p. 207.

24. R. W. Komer, “Impact of Pacification on Insurgency in South Vietnam,” The Komer Report, Santa Monica, CA: The Rand Corporation, August 1970, available from www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/papers/2008/P4443.pdf.

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25. RC South and RC Southwest are comprised of the following provinces: Zabul: 6,696 square miles, Kandahar: 20,858 square miles, Daykundi: 6,984 square miles, Uruzgan: 4,880 square miles, Helmand: 22,619 square miles, and Nimruz: 15,832 square miles.

26. Excludes Afghan diaspora resident in Pakistan and Iran. See The World Factbook, Washington, DC: CIA, 2010.

27. Ian S. Livingston and Michael O’Hanlon, “Afghanistan In-dex, Also Including Selected Data on Pakistan,” Washington, DC: The Brookings Institute, January 10, 2014, available from www.brookings.edu/~/media/Programs/foreign%20policy/afghanistan%20index/index20140110.pdf.

28. Fabrizio Foschini, “Changing of the Guards: Is the APPF Program Coming to an End?” The Afghan Analysts Network, March 8, 2014, available from https://www.afghanistan-analysts.org/changing-of-the-guards-is-the-appf-program-coming-to-an-end/.

29. “Departing U.S. General Says Afghan Forces ‘Inept’ at Basic Motor Repairs,” Reuters, Kabul, Afghanistan, December 11, 2104, available from www.reuters.com/article/2014/12/11/us-afghan-istan-usa-idUSKBN0JP0H120141211. On December 11, 2014, de-parting ISAF Commander Lieutenant General Joseph Anderson told Reuters news agency that 20 percent of the 195,000 ANA bil-lets on paper are unfilled.

30. “Iraq: Population,” Countryeconomy.com, available from countryeconomy.com/demography/population/iraq.

31. Army Field Manual (FM) 3-24/Marine Corps Warfighting Publication (MCWP) 3-33.5, Insurgencies and Countering Insurgen-cies, Washington, DC: DoD, December 15, 2006, pp. 1-13. Italics added.

32. Jeffrey A. Friedman, “Manpower and Counterinsurgency, Empirical Foundations for Theory and Doctrine,” Security Studies, Vol. 20, No. 4, 2011, pp. 556-591.

33. Livingston and O’Hanlon, “Afghanistan Index, Also Including Selected Data on Pakistan.”

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34. James Willbanks, The Battle of an Loc, Bloomington, IN: The Indiana University Press, 2005, p. 2.

35. Author’s recollection.

36. Ibid.

37. Approximately 15,000 men in 22 regular ARVN Ranger Battalions in 10 Groups, and 33 Border Ranger Battalions in five groups with a strength of 14,365 men.

38. Lieutenant General (Ret.) Burton Patrick, “ARVN Rangers,” Untold Stories, available from vnafmamn.com/ARVN_ Rangers.html.

39. “Afghanistan National Army: Commando Brigade,” Afghanistan Army, available from www.crwflags.com/fotw/flags/af%5Eana.html#comm.

40. “In Afghanistan, Army Struggles to Wage War with Dam-aged Equipment, Poor Logistics,” The Washington Post, October 13, 2013, available from www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/in-afghanistan-army-struggles-to-wage-war-with-damaged-equipment-poor-logistics/2013/10/17/96118b40-34e6-11e3-89db-8002ba99b894_story.html.

41. Dan Nolan, “Amateurs Talk Tactics, Professionals Talk Logistics: Thinking About the Strategic Price of Oil,” Washing-ton, DC: Truman National Security Project, June 27, 2012, avail-able from trumanproject.org/doctrine-blog/amateurs-talk-tactics-pro-fessionals-talk-logistics-thinking-about-the-strategic-price-of-oil/.

42. “Public Lecture and Open Discussion ‘The Afghan Na-tional Army: Sustainability Challenges beyond Financial As-pects’,” ARU, Tuesday, November 18, 2014, Kabul, Afghanistan: Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit, p. 5.

43. “Assessment of U.S. Government and Coalition Ef-forts to Develop the Logistics Sustainment Capability of the Af-ghan National Army,” Report of the Inspector General, Report No. DODIG-2015-047, Washington, DC: DoD, December 19, 2014, available from www.dodig.mil/pubs/documents/DODIG- 2015-047.pdf.

98

44. Interview with embedded U.S. advisor, October 12, 2014.

45. “Departing U.S. General Says Afghan Forces ‘Inept’ at Basic Motor Repairs.”

46. See, for example, “Afghan Army Begins to Take the Lead,” The New York Times, April 7, 2013, available from www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2013/04/07/world/asia/20130408-AFGHANARMY.html#15.

47. The main access road through Kunar Province, which runs parallel to the Durand Line, is nicknamed “Route California.” Da-vid Kelly, The Kunar ADT and the Afghan Coin Fight, Bloomington, IN: Authorhouse, 2011, pp. 99, 106.

48. “At Afghan Military Hospital, Graft and Deadly Neglect,” The Wall Street Journal, September 3, 2011, available from online.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424053111904480904576496703389391710.

49. “The Pentagon’s Shocking Cover-Up of the Afghan Na-tional Military Hospital Scandal,” Buzz Feed News, August 7, 2012, available from www.buzzfeed.com/mhastings/exclusive-the-pentagons-shocking-cover-up-of-the.

50. James Gibson, The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam, New York, Grove Press, December 1, 2007.

51. Ibid.

52. “Taliban Kill Seven Afghan Police Officers in Raid on Checkpoint,” The Guardian, December 21, 2014, available from www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/21/taliban-kill-afghan-police-checkpoint.

53. “Public Lecture and Open Discussion ‘The Afghan National Army: Sustainability Challenges beyond Financial Aspects‘,” ARU, Tuesday, November 18, 2014, p. 5.

54. Antonio Giustozzi, “The Afghan National Army: Sustain-ability Challenges Beyond Financial Aspects,” Kabul, Afghani-stan: Afghan Research and Evaluation Unit, February 2014, p. 8.

55. Ibid.

99

56. Fred Kaplan, “Who Disbanded the Iraqi Army?” Slate, September 7, 2007, available from www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/war_stories/2007/09/who_disbanded_the_iraqi_ army.html.

57. “The Iraqi Army Never Was,” The American Conservative, October 9, 2014, available from www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-iraqi-army-never-was/.

58. Michael O’Hanlon, “Why the World Shouldn’t Write Off the Iraqi Army Just Yet,” Reuters, October 22, 2014, available from blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2014/10/22/why-the-world-shouldnt-give-up-on-the-iraqi-army-just-yet/.

59. “Iraq army Capitulates to Isis Militants in Four Cities,” The Guardian, June 11, 2014, available from www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/11/mosul-isis-gunmen-middle-east-states.

60. Robert Mikesh, Flying Dragons: The South Vietnamese Air Force, Atglen, PA: Schiffer Publishing, 2005.

61. The History of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: The Joint Chiefs of Staff and the War in Vietnam 1969-1970, p. 197.

62. Author’s professional recollection.

63. Interestingly, two of the ANAF helicopter pilots were women who flew many operational sorties. One was subsequent-ly killed in an accident unrelated to her military duties.

64. “Afghan Air Force Ascent Slow, Imperiling Battle with Taliban,” Reuters, January 25, 2015, available from www. reuters.com/article/2015/01/26/us-afghanistan-airforce-idUSK-BN0KY10Z20150126.

65. Ibid.

66. “Public Lecture and Open Discussion ‘The Afghan National Army: Sustainability Challenges beyond Financial Apsects’,”ARU, Tuesday, November 18, 2014, p. 7.

100

67. “Afghan Air Force (AAF),” Afghan War News, available from www.afghanwarnews.info/air/afghanairforce.htm#Endnotes.

68. “SNC, Embraer Deliver First A-29 to US Air Force,” De-fense News, September 25, 2014, available from www.defensenews.com/article/20140925/DEFREG02/309250042/SNC-Embraer-Deliver-First-29-US-Air-Force.

69. “MD Helicopters Awarded $44M More for Afghan MD530F Weapon System,” Helihub, October 2, 2014, available from helihub.com/2014/10/02/md-helicopters-awarded-44m-more-for-afghan-md530f-weapon-system/.

70. “Delivery of 63 Mi-17V-5 Helicopters to Afghan Air Force Completed,” Kabul, Afghanistan: Khaama Press, October 31, 2014, available from www.khaama.com/delivery-of-63-mi-17v-5-heli-copters-to-afghan-air-force-completed-8691.

71. “Afghan Air Force Ascent Slow, Imperiling Battle with Taliban.”

72. “Afghan Air Force Probed in Drug Running,” The Wall Street Journal, March 10, 2012; “Afghan Air Force Suspected of Drug Running: Report,” ABC News, March 8, 2012; “Afghan Air Force: Flying Drug Mules That Fuel Civil War,” Danger Room at Wired.com, March 8, 2012.

73. “Ties to Russia Arms Supplier Snarl U.S. Sanctions Ef-forts,” The Wall Street Journal, March 26, 2014, available from www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304688104579467542674720908.

74. “SIGAR Audit 13-13: Afghan Special Mission Wing: DOD Moving Forward with $771.8 Million Purchase of Aircraft that the Afghans Cannot Operate and Maintain,” Washington, DC: SIGAR, p. 7, available from www.sigar.mil/pdf/audits/2013-05-27-audit-13-13.pdf.

75. Ibid.

76. Michael C. Veneri, “Multiplying by Zero,” Military Review, January-February 2011, available from www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awc-gate/milreview/veneri_janfeb2011.pdf.

101

77. Ibid., pp. 89-90.

78. “Islamist Militancy in the Pakistan-Afghanistan Border Region and U.S. Policy,” Washington, DC: Congressional Re-search Service, November 21, 2008, p. CRS-8, fn 21.

79. Frank Clements, Conflict in Afghanistan: a Historical Ency-clopedia, Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2003, p. 54. “Afghanistan: Arena for a New Rivalry,” The Washington Post, September 16, 1998, available from pqasb.pqarchiver.com/washingtonpost/doc/408407755.html?FMT=ABS&FMTS=ABS:FT&type=current&date=Sep%2016,%201998&author=Pamela%20Constable&pub=The%20Wash-ington%20Post&edition=&startpage=&desc=Afghanistan:%20Arena%20for%20a%20New%20Rivalry; Consular Officer Brad Hansen, U.S. Consulate (Peshawar) Cable, “Afghanistan: A Re-port of Pakistani Military Assistance to the Taliban,” March 24, 1998, Declassified. The Taliban File, Part I, Document 26, Wash-ington, DC: The National Security Archive, The George Washing-ton University, available from www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB97/tal25.pdf.

80. Roger Boniface, MIGs over North Vietnam: The Vietnam Peo-ple’s Air Force in Combat, 1965-75, Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Military History, 2010.

81. “The Modern Iraqi Military is on a Path of Slow Recovery after the U.S. Invasion of 2013,” Global Fire Power, March 27, 2014, available from www.globalfirepower.com/country-military-strength-detail.asp?country_id=iraq.

82. Ibid.

83. “Iraq’s Air Force,” The Huffington Post, August 23, 2014, available from www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-weigant/iraqs-air-force_b_5523840.html.

84. “Iraq Cobbling Together Makeshift Air Force to Fight ISIS,” The Washington Post, June 27, 2014, available from www.washingtonpost.com/world/2014/06/27/be172f43-cf98-4677-8e6d-4d64a5ae5e1d_story.html.

102

85. The Aviationist, available from theaviationist.com/tag/iraqi-air-force/.

86. Valéry Tarrius, “La Police de Campagne du Sud-Vietnam 1967–1975” (“The Police of the South Vietnam Campaign 1967-1975”), Paris, France: Armes Militaria Magazine, Histoire & Col-lections, March 2005, pp. 37–43.

87. Thi Minh-Phuong Ngo, Education and Agricultural Growth in Vietnam, Madison, WI: Department of Agricultural and Ap-plied Economics, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2006, p. 14, available from perso.fundp.ac.be/~tpngo/Education_WPjun06.pdf.

88. “Illiteracy Slows Afghan Army, U.S. Pullout, “ CBS News September 14, 2009, available from www.cbsnews.com/news/illitera-cy-slows-afghan-army-us-pullout/.

89. Kenneth Katzman, “Afghanistan: Post-Taliban Gover-nance, Security, and U.S. Policy,” Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, December 2, 2014, p. 32, available from www.fas.org/sgp/crs/row/RL30588.pdf.

90. Antonio Giustozzi and Mohammed Isaqzadeh, Policing Afghanistan: The Politics of the Lame Leviathan, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2013, p. 74.

91. Ibid.

92. “Police Transition in Afghanistan,” Washington, PA: U.S. Institute of Peace, February 2013, p. 5, available from www.usip.org/sites/default/files/SR322.pdf.

93. “Afghan National Police: More than $300 Million in Annual, U.S.-funded Salary Payments Is Based on Partially Verified or Rec-onciled Data,” SIGAR 15-26 Audit Report, Washington, DC: SIGAR, January 2015, available from www.sigar.mil/pdf/audits/SIGAR-15- 26-AR.pdf.

94. Ibid., p. 6.

95. Ibid.

103

96. “Watchdog: US May Be Paying Salaries of ‘Ghost’ Af-ghan Policemen,” Stars and Stripes, March 19, 2014, available from www.stripes.com/news/watchdog-us-may-be-paying-salaries-of-ghost-afghan-policemen-1.273607.

97. “Afghan National Police: More than $300 Million in An-nual, U.S.-funded Salary Payments Is Based on Partially Verified or Reconciled Data,” p. 5.

98. Ibid., p. 6.

99. Ibid., p. 7.

100. “Afghan Forces Stagger through First Test,” Asia Times, November 5, 2013, available from www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/SOU-01-051113.html.

101. “Afghan Forces’ Casualties ‘Not Sustainable,’ U.S. Com-mander Says,” The Washington Post, November 5, 2014, available from www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/afghan-forc-es-casualties-not-sustainable-us-commander-says/2014/11/05/a3d-f595a-6514-11e4-bb14-4cfea1e742d5_story.html.

102. “Major Incidents of Terrorist Violence in Jammu and Kashmir 2014,” South Asia Terrorism Portal, available from www.satp.org/satporgtp/countries/india/states/jandk/data_sheets/majorinci-dents2014.htm.

103. “Guide to the Analysis of Insurgency,” p. 11.

104. Ibid.

105. “Afghanistan Police Corruption Is Fuelling Insurgency,” The Telegraph, June 3, 2010, available from www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/afghanistan/7801459/Afghanistan-police-corrup-tion-is-fuelling-insurgency.html.

106. “Afghanistan in 2013, A Survey of the Afghan People,” Washington, DC: The Asia Foundation, 2013, available from asia-foundation.org/resources/pdfs/2013AfghanSurvey.pdf.

107. Ibid.

104

108. “Afghanistan Police Corruption Is Fuelling Insurgency.”

109. “This is What Winning Looks Like,” YouTube, Vice News, posted May 27, 2013, available from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ja5Q75hf6QI.

110. “Afghan Forces’ Casualties ‘Not Sustainable,’ U.S. Com-mander Says.”

111. “Afghan Official: Insurgents Kill 9 Police,” The Sun Herald, January 4, 2015.

112. Ibid.

113. “Police Officer Killed in Afghanistan Blast,” Z News, January 12, 2015, available from zeenews.india.com/news/india/ police-officer-killed-in-afghanistan-blast_1528916.html.

114. “Afghan forces’ Casualties ‘not Sustainable,’ U.S. Com-mander Says.”

115. Ibid.

116. Ibid.

117. Azam Ahmed.

118. “Truth, Lies and Afghanistan,” The Armed Forces Jour-nal, February 1, 2012, available from www.armedforcesjournal.com/truth-lies-and-afghanistan/.

119. Ibid.

120. Jim Randle, “Study Finds Iraqi National Police Ineffec-tive in Combating Terrorism,” Voice of America (VOA) News, October 14, 2007.

121. “Iraq, Education in Transition Needs and Challenges 2004,” Paris, France: United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), 2004, available from www.unesco.org/education/iraq/na_13jan2005.pdf.

105

122. William Rosenau, US Internal Security Assistance to South Vietnam: Insurgency, Subversion and Public Order, New York: Rout-ledge, 2007, p. 128.

123. “Taliban Push into Afghan Districts that U.S. Had Se-cured,” The New York Times, December 22, 2014, available from www.nytimes.com/2014/12/23/world/taliban-push-into-afghan-dis-tricts-that-us-had-secured.html?_r=0.

124. “Insurgents in Afghanistan’s Laghman Province May Win by not Losing,” Stars and Stripes, November 14, 2014, avail-able from www.stripes.com/news/middle-east/insurgents-in-afghani-stan-s-laghman-province-may-win-by-not-losing-1.314358.

125. “An Army for Afghanistan,” The New York Times, December 15, 2014.

126. “Misgivings by U.S. General as Afghanistan Mission Ends,” The New York Times, December 8, 2014, available from www.nytimes.com/2014/12/09/world/asia/us-general-joseph-anderson-mission-in- afghanistan.html?_r=1.

127. “No Coordination between Security Agencies: Ghani,” TOLOnews.com, December 15, 2014.

128. “Departing U.S. General Says Afghan Forces ‘Inept’ at Basic Motor Repairs.”

129. “Afghan Police Lead Insurgent Fight at High Cost,” As-sociated Press, December 28, 2014, available from abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/afghan-police-lead-insurgent-fight-high-cost-27859001.

130. Azam Ahmed.

131. Ibid.

132. Ibid.

133. Ibid.

106

134. The Combined Action Platoon (CAP) program was well described by former Marine and DoD official Bing West in The Village, New York: Harper and Row, 1972.

135. “Afghanistan: Annual Report on Protection of Ci-vilians in Armed Conflict,” Kabul, Afghanistan: United Na-tions Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), March 2011, p. 33.

136. West.

137. “Village Stability Operations (VSO),” Afghan War News, available from www.afghanwarnews.info/security/village-stability-operations-vso.htm.

138. Lewis Walt, Strange War, Strange Strategy: A General’s Report on the War in Vietnam, New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1970, p. 105.

139. Max Boot, “The Lessons of a Quagmire,” The New York Times, November 26, 2003.

140. “Independent Assessment of the Afghan National Se-curity Forces,” Appendix E, Table 42, Arlington, VA: Center for Naval Analysis, January 2014, pp. 319-324, available from www.cna.org/sites/default/files/research/CNA%20Independent%20Assess-ment%20of%20the%20ANSF.pdf.

141. Robert Hulslander and Jake Spivey, “Village Stability Operations and Afghan Local Police,” Prism 3, No. 3, 2012, p. 132.

142. “Afghanistan: Annual Report on Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict,” p. 33.

143. Graham Cosmas and Terrence Murray, U.S. Marines in Vietnam: Vietnamization and Redeployment, 1970–1971, History and Museums Division, Headquarters, U.S. Marine Corps, Washing-ton, DC: Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Print-ing Office (USGPO), 1986, p. 139.

144. James Gibson, The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam, New York: Grove Press, December 1, 2007.

107

145. “Afghanistan: Annual Report on Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict, p. 33.

146. Mark Brown, Jr., “Village Stability Operations: An His-torical Perspective from Vietnam to Afghanistan,” The Long War Journal, March 28, 2013, available from smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/village-stability-operations-an-historical-perspective-from-vietnam-to-afghanistan.

147. Ibid.

148. “No Time to Lose: Promoting the Accountability of the Afghan National Security Forces,” Oxfam, No. 10, May 2011, p. 8.

149. “Afghanistan: Annual Report on Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict,” p. 31.

150. “Document - Getting away with Murder? The Impunity of International Forces in Afghanistan,” Amnesty International, February 26, 2009, available from https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/ASA11/001/2009/en/. See also “Afghanistan—Kandahar Death Squads,” Channel l4 News, available from www.journey-man.tv/?lid=60529&tmpl=transcript; and “U.S. Covert Paramilitary Presence in Afghanistan much Larger than Thought,” The Wash-ington Post, September 22, 2010, available from www.washington-post.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/22/AR2010092206241.html.

151. “U.S. Covert Paramilitary Presence in Afghanistan much Larger than Thought.”

152. “Exclusive: CIA Falls Back in Afghanistan,” The Dai-ly Beast, April 5, 2014, available from www.thedailybeast.com/ articles/2014/05/04/exclusive-cia-falls-back-in-afghanistan.html#.

153. “CIA Trains Covert Units of Afghans to Continue the Fight against Taliban,” The Independent, July 20, 2011, available from www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/cia-trains-covert-units-of-afghans-to-continue-the-fight-against-taliban-2317182.html.

154. Ibid.

108

155. “A US-Backed Militia Runs Amok in Afghanistan,” Al Jazeera, July 23, 2014, available from america.aljazeera.com/arti-cles/2014/7/23/exclusive-a-killinginandar.html.

156. “After America,” The New Yorker, June 9, 2012, available from www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/07/09/after-america-2.

157. Katzman.

158. “No Time to Lose,” p. 8.

159. “US-Trained Afghan Police Guilty of Abuse, Report Finds,” British Broadcasting Corporation, December 16, 2011, available from www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-16211543.

160. “No Time to Lose,”p. 8.

161. “As U.S. Scales Back in Afghanistan, Local Defense Pro-gram Expands,” San Diego Union Tribune, August 15, 2011, avail-able from www.utsandiego.com/news/2011/aug/15/us-scales-back-af-ghanistan-local-defense-program-e/2/?#article-copy.

162. “Afghanistan: Annual Report on Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict,” pp. 32-33.

163. “Afghan Local Police Group Deserts to Taliban-Led In-surgents,” The Washington Post, July 4, 2012, available from www.washingtonpost.com/world/war-zones/afghan-local-police-group-des-erts-to- taliban-led-insurgents/2012/07/04/gJQAzvNCNW_story.html.

164. “6 Afghan Local Police Officer [sic] Surrender to Taliban in Ghor,” Kabul, Afghanistan: Khaama Press, June 17, 2013, avail-able from www.khaama.com/afghan-local-police-officer-surrender-to-taliban-in-ghor-2195.

165. Hulslander and Spivey, p. 127.

166. “Taliban Return to Afghan Town that Rose Up and Drove Out Its Leaders,” The Guardian, October 27, 2014, available from www.theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/27/taliban-return-afghan-town-gizab.

109

167. “Local Police Selling Weapons and Ammunition to Tali-ban,” Kabul, Afghanistan: Khaama Press, November 3, 2014.

168. “Insurgents in Afghanistan’s Laghman Province May Win by not Losing.”

169. Seth Jones, “Afghanistan Redux: Countering the Taliban Insurgency,” V. Krishnappa, Shanthis D’Souza, Priyanka Singh, eds., Saving Afghanistan, New Delhi, India: Academic Foundation, 2009, p. 69.

170. “Insurgents in Afghanistan’s Laghman Province May Win by not Losing.”

171. Ibid.

172. See, for example, “Bring Back the Bad Guys,” The Ameri-can Conservative, January 1, 2010, available from www.theamerican-conservative.com/articles/bring-back-the-bad-guys/.

173. Boot.

174. “Bomb Explodes at Funeral in Pakistan,” National Public Radio, September 15, 2011, available from www.npr.org/2011/09/15/140508406/bomb-explodes-at-funeral-in-pakistan.

175. Report of the UNHCR Sub-Office Jalalabad of 8/10/2002, Geneva, Switzerland: Office of the United Nations High Commis-sioner for Refugees, available from www.aims.org.af/afg/dist_pro-files/unhcr_district_profiles/eastern/kunar/dangam.pdf.

176. “Pakistani Taliban Squeezed by Afghan Revolt, U.S. Drone Strikes,” Reuters, December 4, 2014, available from www.reuters.com/article/2014/12/04/us-pakistan-afghanistan-taliban-idUSKCN0JI0XD20141204.

177. “Bomb Explodes at Funeral In Pakistan.”

178. “Kurds Advance against IS Group in Syria’s Kobani.” The Daily Mail, December 20, 2014, available from www.daily-mail.co.uk/wires/ap/article-2881727/Kurds-advance-against-IS-group- Syrias-Kobani.html.

110

179. Thomas Johnson and Chris Mason, “No Sign until the Burst of Fire: Understanding the Pakistan-Afghanistan Frontier,” International Security, Vol. 32, Issue 4, Spring 2008, Harvard Uni-versity: The Belfer Center, pp. 41-77.

180. Giustozzi, “The Afghan National Army: Sustainability

Challenges Beyond Financial Aspects,” pp. 21-22.

181. “Investigation: Friendly Fire Airstrike that Killed U.S. Special Forces Was Avoidable,” The Washington Post, September 4, 2014, available from www.washingtonpost.com/news/checkpoint/wp/2014/09/04/investigation-friendly-fire-airstrike-that-killed-u-s-spe-cial-forces-was-avoidable/.

182. Giustozzi, “The Afghan National Army: Sustainability Challenges Beyond Financial Aspects,” p. 22.

183. Public discussion with senior analyst, October 12, 2014.

184. “U.S. Airstrikes Remain Crucial to Afghan Forces in Tali-ban Battles,” The Los Angeles Times, December 28, 2014, available from www.latimes.com/world/afghanistan-pakistan/la-fg-afghanistan-us-military-20141228-story.html#page=1.

185. Joint Publication (JP) 3-09.3, Joint Air Support, Washington, DC: Joint Chiefs of Staff, available from www.fas.org/irp/doddir/dod/jp3_09_3.pdf.

186. Giustozzi, “The Afghan National Army: Sustainability Challenges Beyond Financial Aspects,” p. 8.

187. “Smaller NATO Mission Has Big Job to Train Afghan Army in Time,” Reuters, January 6, 2015.

188. Correspondence with the author, January 2, 2015.

189. “In a Shift, Obama Extends U.S. Role in Afghan Combat,” The New York Times, November 21, 2014, available from www.ny-times.com/2014/11/22/us/politics/in-secret-obama-extends-us-role-in-afghan-combat.html.

111

190. “Obama Announces Afghanistan Troop Withdrawal Plan,” CNN, June 23, 2011, available from www.cnn.com/2011/POLITICS/06/22/afghanistan.troops.drawdown/.

191. Johnson and Mason, “No Sign until the Burst of Fire.”

192. “Taliban Attacks on ‘Death Road’ Highlight Continuing Persecution of Afghanistan’s Hazaras,” Associated Press, January 22, 2014, available from www.foxnews.com/world/2014/01/22/taliban-attacks-on-death-road-highlight-continuing-persecution-afghanistan/.

193 . “Will Hazaras Be Safe in Afghanistan after NATO’s Pull-out?” Hazara People International Network, July 28, 2014, avail-able from www.hazarapeople.com/2014/07/28/will-hazaras-be-safe-in-afghanistan-after-natos-pullout/.

194. Report of the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), 1st Quarter 2014, April 30, 2014, p. iv, available from www.sigar.mil/pdf/quarterlyreports/2014-04-30qr.pdf. “SIGAR’s auditors found that the single biggest issue limiting collection of customs revenues is corruption. Moreover, U.S. advisors report that Afghan employees who try to properly collect customs duties have been kidnapped and intimidated.”

195. “How the U.S. Killed the Wrong Afghans,” Time Maga-zine, February 6, 2002, available from content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,198864,00.html.

196. Brian Williams, Afghanistan Declassified: A Guide to Amer-ica’s Longest War, Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012, p. 62.

197. “System Failure: Anthropologists on the Battlefield,” USA Today, August 11, 2013, available from www.usatoday.com/story/nation/2013/08/11/human-terrain-system-afghanistan-war-an-thropologists/2640297/.

198. Shaista Wahab and Barry Youngerman, A Brief History of Afghanistan, New York: InfoBase Publishing, 2007, p. 13.

199. Anthony Arnold, Afghanistan’s Two-Party Communism: Parcham and Khalq, Stanford, CA: Hoover Press, 1984.

112

200. Barnett R. Rubin, The Fragmentation of Afghanistan, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002, p. 105.

201. “The Soviet Occupation of Afghanistan,” PBS Newshour, October 10, 2006, available from www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/asia-july-dec06-soviet_10-10/.

202. Steve Coll, Ghost Wars, New York: Penguin Books, 2004.

203. Ibid.

204. The Hazaras were represented by the “Tehran Eight,” a group of eight Shi’s mujahideen groups composed of (1) the Af-ghan Hezbollah, led by Karim Agmadi Yak Daste, (2) the Nasr Party, led by Muhammad Hussein Sadiqi, Abdul Ali Mazari and Shaykh Shafak, (3) the Corps of Islamic Revolution Guardians of Afghanistan, led by Sheikh Akbari, Mokhsem Rezai, and Sapake Pasdar, (4) the Islamic Movement of Afghanistan, led by Muham-mad Asif Muhsini and Shaykh Sadeq Hashemi, (5) the Islamic Revolution Movement, led by Nasrullah Mansur, (6) Committee of Islamic Agreement (aka the “Shura Party”), led by Sayeed Ali Beheshti and Sayeed Djagran, (7) the Union of Islamic Fighters, led by Mosbah Sade, an Afghan Hazara leader from Bamian, and (8) the Raad (“Thunder”) party, led by Shaykh Sayeed Abdul Jaf-far Nadiri, and Muhammad Hazai Sayeed Ismail Balkhee. The Hizb-e Wahdat-e Islami Afghanistan was formed in Teheran as a united front to represent the Teheran Eight. The Hazaras were the second largest group of mujahideen after the Pashtuns. Thomas Ruttig, Islamists, Leftists—and a Void in the Center. Afghanistan’s Po-litical Parties and where they come from (1902-2006), Kabul, Afghani-stan: Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, Afghanistan Office, 2006.

205. Coll, Fn. 27.

206. These actions are generally interpreted by historians as the result of giving authority to local Soviet commanders to pacify their areas, rather than a deliberate policy of extermination or-chestrated by army-level policy, not that it makes a great deal of difference in the long run.

207. Marek Sliwinski, “Afghanistan: The Decimation of a People,” Orbis, Winter, 1989, p. 39.

113

208. “Remembering the ‘Lion of Panjshir’,” Al Jazeera, Sep-tember 9, 2012, available from www.aljazeera.com/indepth/fea-tures/2012/09/20129913233327927.html.

209. Masood was assassinated by an al-Qaeda suicide team posing as Arab journalists 2 days before the attacks of September 11, 2001.

210. Afghanistan: A Country Study, Washington, DC: American University Press, 1986, pp. 288-289.

211. Giustozzi, “The Afghan National Army: Sustainability Challenges Beyond Financial Aspects,” p. 10.

212. Forrest Marion, “The Destruction and Rebuilding of the Afghan Air Force, 1989-2009,” Air Power History, June 2010, Joint Base Andrews, MD, Air Force Historical Foundation, available from www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-232177523.html.

213. Clements, p. 54.

214. Seymour Hersh, Chain of Command, New York: Harper Collins, 2005, p. 132.

215. Ahmed Rashid, Descent into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia, New York: Viking Press, 2008.

216. BBC News (October 26, 2011); Ahmed Rashid, “Secret Pakistan: Double Cross,” Descent into Chaos.

217. “The ISI’s Great Game in Afghanistan,” The Diplomat, June 8, 2014; “Mistrust between Afghanistan and Pakistan soars as U.S. forces depart,” The Washington Post, September 25, 2014.

218. “Pakistan’s Spy Agency Is Tied to Attack on U.S. Embas-sy,” The New York Times, September 22, 2011, available from www.nytimes.com/2011/09/23/world/asia/mullen-asserts-pakistani-role-in-attack-on-us-embassy.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0.

219. Thomas Johnson, “Financing Afghan Terrorism: Drugs, Thugs, and Creative Movements of Money,” Jeanne K. Giraldo

114

and Harold A. Trinkunas, eds., Terrorism Financing and State Re-sponses: A Comparative Perspective, Stanford, CA: Stanford Univer-sity Press, 2007, p. 112.

220. “Can Iraq’s Fate Befall Afghanistan?” Al Jazeera, June 21, 2014, available from america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/6/22/afghan-istan-can-iraqscrisishappenheretoo.html.

221. In late-2002, the author presented an unclassified State Department briefing to the interagency on the incipient insur-gency in Afghanistan, using the CIA’s unclassified “Guide to the Evaluation of Insurgencies” publication to cross walk events and developments on the ground in Afghanistan. The unclassified findings were pronounced “premature.”

222. Spencer Ackerman, “How the CIA’s Bags of Cash Under-mined the Afghanistan War,” Wired.com, April 29, 2013, available from www.wired.com/2013/04/karzai-cia-money/.

223. “Fraud and Folly in Afghanistan,” Foreign Policy, Sep-tember 23, 2014, available from southasia.foreignpolicy.com/posts/ 2014/09/23/fraud_and_folly_in_afghanistan.

224. “Afghan Army Death Rate Spikes 30 Percent,” Yahoo News, October 3, 2014, available from news.yahoo.com/afghan-army-death-rate-spikes-30-percent-071633638.html.

225. “Fraud and Folly in Afghanistan,” Foreign Policy, Sep-tember 23, 2014, available from southasia.foreignpolicy.com/posts/ 2014/09/23/fraud_and_folly_in_afghanistan.

226. Ibid.

227. Ibid.

228. “Afghanistan in 2013: A Survey of the Afghan People.”

229. Lodin was nominated by President Ghani for the post of Minister of Defense but Lodin withdrew his nomination after 48 hours.

230. Mohammadullah Halim Sirat, “Why Choose Ghani over Abdullah,” Pajhwok Afghan News, June 11, p. 204, available

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from www.elections.pajhwok.com/en/content/why-choose-ghani-over-abdullah.

231. Ahmed Rashid, “The Way Out of Afghanistan,” The New York Review of Books, January 13, 2011, available from www.ny-books.com/articles/archives/2011/jan/13/way-out-afghanistan/.

232. “Afghan Projects, Officials in Limbo with Delay of Cabi-net,” Daily Times, December 3, 2014, available from www.daily-times.com.pk/region/03-Dec-2014/afghan-projects-officials-in-limbo-with-delay-of-cabinet.

233. Ibid.

234. “Parliament Approves 9 of 19 Cabinet Nominees,” Tolo News, January 28, 2015, available from www.tolonews.com/en/af-ghanistan/17996-parliament-votes-on-cabinet-nominees.

235. “The Warlord Who Defines Afghanistan: An Excerpt From Bruce Riedel’s ‘What We Won’,” Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, July 27, 2014, available from www.brookings.edu/research/opinions/2014/07/27-warlord-who-defines-afghanistan-riedel.

236. “Dostum Says 20,000 Special Force Set to Root Out Tali-ban,” Kabul, Afghanistan: Khaama Press, January 1, 2015, avail-able from www.khaama.com/dostum-20-000-special-force-set-to-elimi-nate-taliban-2649/.

237. Author’s recollection.

238. “Quarterly Report to the United States Congress,” Table 3.9, Washington, DC: SIGAR, April 30, 2014, p. 97.

239. Discussion with U.S. official in public forum, November 23, 2014.

240. “NATO Alarm over Afghan Army Crisis: Loss of Re-cruits Threatens Security as Handover Looms,” The Independent, March 31, 2013, available from www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/nato-alarm-over-afghan-army-crisis-loss-of-recruits-threatens- security-as-handover-looms-8555238.html.

116

241. “Quarterly Report to the United States Congress,” Table 3.9, p. 97.

242. “The Afghan National Security Forces Beyond 2014: Will They Be Ready?” eSeminar Series Primer Paper No. 2, Kitchen-er, Ontario, Canada: Center for Security Governance, February 2014, available from www.ssrresourcecentre.org/wp-content/uploads/ 2014/02/eSeminar-Primer-No.-2.pdf.

243. “A Force in Fragments: Reconstituting the Afghan Na-tional Army,” Brussels, Belgium: International Crisis Group (ICG), Asia Report No. 190, May 12, 2010, p. 17, available from www.crisisgroup.org/en/regions/asia/south-asia/afghanistan/190-a-force-in-fragments-reconstituting-the-afghan-national-army.aspx.

244. Ira A. Hunt, Jr., Losing Vietnam: How America Abandoned Southeast Asia, Louisville, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2013, pp. 111-112, 183.

245. Giustozzi, “The Afghan National Army: Sustainability Challenges Beyond Financial Aspects,”p. 10.

246. “NATO Alarm over Afghan Army Crisis: Loss of Recruits Threatens Security as Handover Looms.”

247. Departing U.S. General Says Afghan Forces ‘Inept’ at Basic Motor Repairs.”

248. “Afghanistan: 2014 and Beyond,” Vienna, Austria: Aus-trian Federal Ministry of the Interior, 2014, p. 37, available from www.bfa.gv.at/files/broschueren/AFGH_Bookie_2014_03.pdf.

249. “Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan Needs to Provide Better Accountability and Transparency Over Direct Contributions,” Report of the Inspector General, Depart-ment of Defense Report No. DODIG-2014-102, Washington, DC: DoD, August 29, 2014, p. 17, available from www.dodig.mil/pubs/documents/DODIG-2014-102.pdf.

250. SIGAR Report to Congress, Washington, DC: U.S. Con-gress, January 30, 2013, pp. 73-74, cited in Anthony Cordesman, The Afghan War in 2013: Meeting the Challenges of Transition, Vol. III, draft, March 28, 2013, p. 58.

117

251. “Iraq Says It Found 50,000 “Ghost Soldiers” on Pay-roll,” Reuters, December 1, 2014, available from in.reuters.com/article/2014/12/01/mideast-crisis-iraq-soldiers-idINKCN0J-F2RX20141201.

252. “Public Lecture and Open Discussion ‘The Afghan Na-tional Army: Sustainability Challenges beyond Financial As-pects’,” ARU, Tuesday, November 18, 2014, p. 6.

253. “Departing U.S. General Says Afghan Forces ‘Inept’ at Basic Motor Repairs.”

254. “Quarterly Report to the United States Congress,” SI-GAR, Table 3.9, p. 97.

255. Ibid.

256. Ibid.

257. 119,485 x .63 = 75,258.

258. Gary Owen, “Paint It Pink: The US Redefining ANA Suc-cess,” Afghan Analysts Network, August 1, 2012, available from www.afghanistan-analysts.org/paint-it-pink-the-us-redefining-ana-success/; Gary Owen, “SIGAR: Widely Cited 352,000 ANSF Force Size Is Not Validated,” Empty Wheel, March 27, 2013, available from https://www.emptywheel.net/2013/03/27/sigar-widely-cited-352000-ansf-force-size-is-not-validated/.

259. “Between April 2010 and August 2011, the International Joint Commission changed the Commander’s Unit Assessment Tool rating definition level titles four times.” See “Afghan Nation-al Security Forces: Actions Needed to Improve Plans for Sustain-ing Capability Assessment Efforts,” SIGAR 14-33 Audit Report, SIGAR, February 5, 2014, available from www.sigar.mil/pdf/audits/SIGAR_14-33-AR.pdf.

260. “Taliban Attack Highly Regarded Afghan Army Unit,” The New York Times, April 12, 2013, available from www.ny-times.com/2013/04/13/world/asia/taliban-attacks-afghan-army-unit.html?pagewanted=all.

118

261. Ibid.

262. “NATO Suddenly Classifies Ratings of Afghan Mili-tary and Police Capabilities,” Washington, DC: Center for Public Integrity, October 30, 2014, available from www.publi-cintegrity.org/2014/10/30/16130/nato-suddenly-classifies-ratings-af-ghan-military-and-police-capabilities.

263. The decision to classify was not made at the request of the Afghan government, which considers the information to be unclassified, according to Khaama Press, available from www.khaama.com/us-military-to-keep-secret-the-details-of-aid-to-afghan-forces-9910. Other news organizations, including Stars and Stripes, Al Jazeera, The Daily Caller, and Empty Wheel reached the same conclusion. The Daily Caller referred to the decision as a “political move” (“Pentagon Spending In Afghanistan Just Got Way Less Transparent,” The Daily Caller, January 29, 2015, available from dailycaller.com/2015/01/29/pentagon-spending-in-afghanistan-just-got-way-less-transparent/). The author’s sources at the ICG in Kabul confirmed the decision to classify the information was unilateral.

264. “True State of Afghan Military Kept Secret, Report Says,” NBC News, October 30, 2014, available from www.nbcnews.com/news/investigations/true-state-afghan-military-kept-secret-report-says-n234866.

265. Giustozzi, “The Afghan National Army: Sustainability Challenges Beyond Financial Aspects,” graph 3, p. 10.

266. Interview with senior Afghan National Army officer, December 7, 2014.

267. FM 1-02, Operational Terms and Graphics, Appendix D, September 21, 2004, available from https://rdl.train.army.mil/catalog-ws/view/100.ATSC/6C01FFE5-0DF6-415F-A13C-92ED36 A708CA-1303039189337/1-02/appd.htm.

268. Giustozzi, “The Afghan National Army: Sustainability Challenges Beyond Financial Aspects,” Table 1, p. 10. Afghan Army force size numbers for the years 1979-89 are derived from these sources: Nabi Misdaq, Afghanistan: Political Frailty and Ex-ternal Interference, Abingdon, Oxon, UK: Taylor & Francis, 2006;

119

David Isby, Russia’s War in Afghanistan, Oxford, UK: Osprey Pub-lishing, 1986, p. 18; Arnold, Afghanistan’s Two-party Communism, p. 111; Phillip Bonosky, Afghanistan–Washington’s Secret War, New York: International Publishers, 2001, p. 261; Bruce Amtstutz, Af-ghanistan: The First Five Years of Soviet Occupation, Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, 1986, pp. 180-181; Roger Kanet, The Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and the Third World, Cam-bridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1987, p. 51; Roger Reese, The Soviet Military Experience: A History of the Soviet Army, 1917–1991, London, UK: Routledge, 2002, p. 167; Rodric Braithwaite, Afgantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan, 1979–1989, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2011, pp. 135, 137; Robert Johnson, The Afghan Way of War: How and Why They Fight, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2011, p. 214; and Thomas Jefferson, Afghanistan: a Cultural and Political History, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010, p. 245. The annual desertion rate found in Amtstutz, Afghanistan: The First Five Years of Soviet Occupation, p. 181.

269. Hunt, p. 183.

270. “Afghan Forces’ Casualties ‘Not Sustainable,’ U.S. Commander Says.”

271. Ibid.

272. “U.S. General: Number of Afghan Troop Deaths ‘Unsus-tainable’,” United Press International, November 5, 2014, available from www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2014/11/05/US-General-Number-of-Aghan-troop-deaths-unsustainable/6681415223870/.

273. “Number of ANA Casualties on the Rise,” Tolo News, October 15, 2014, available from www.tolonews.com/en/afghanistan/16747-number-of-ana-casualties-on-the-rise.

274. “MoD: 6853 Afghan Army Soldiers Martyred since 2003,” Khaama Press, October 21, 2014, available from www. k h a a m a . c o m / m o d - 6 8 5 3 - a f g h a n - a r m y - s o l d i e r s - m a r t y r e d -since-2003-8857.

275. Ibid.

276. “Afghan Forces’ Casualties ‘Not Sustainable,’ U.S. Com-mander Says.”

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277. Catherine Lutz, “US and Coalition Casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan,” Providence, Rhode Island: Brown University: Wat-son Institute, February 21, 2013, Table 4, p. 6, available from cost-sofwar.org/sites/default/files/articles/10/attachments/USandCoalition.pdf.

278. “Quarterly Report to the United States Congress,” SI-GAR, citing “CSTC-A, response to SIGAR data call, 3/31/ 2014,” p. 97.

279. Lutz, Table 4, p. 6.

280. Approximately 17,867,000 Americans served in the mili-tary in World War II. About 39 percent were in rear echelon jobs, roughly double the ANA’s 20 percent. Of these, 407,316 were killed and 671,278 were wounded, a total of 1,078,594 KIA and WIA, or 6 percent of all those who served in uniform. Statistics found at the website of the National World War II Museum, available from www.nationalww2museum.org/learn/education/for-students/ww2-history/ww2-by-the-numbers/us-military.html.

281. “Afghan Taliban Show Resilience Despite Years of US ‘Capture-Kill’ Policy,” The Christian Science Monitor, February 6, 2015, available from www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-South-Cen-tral/2015/0206/Afghan-Taliban-show-resilience-despite-years-of-US-capture-kill-policy.

282. “Can Iraq’s Fate Befall Afghanistan?” Al Jazeera, June 21, 2014, available from america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/6/22/afghan-istan-can-iraqscrisishappenheretoo.html.

283. Ibid.

284. Gareth Porter, “Tajik Grip on Afghan Army Signals New Ethnic War,” IPS, November 20, 2009, available from ipsnorthamer-ica.net/print.php?idnews=2707; Craig Murray, “Civil War Certain as ‘Afghan National Army’ Now Over 60% Tajik,” Craig Murray Blog, March 23, 2010, available from https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2010/03/civil_war_certa/.

285. “Eikenberry Takes Command of Coalition Forces in Af-ghanistan,” U.S. Department of Defense News, May 4, 2005, avail-able from www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=31741.

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286. Murray, “Civil War Certain as ‘Afghan National Army’ Now Over 60% Tajik.”

287. Louis Dupree, Afghanistan, Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni-versity Press, 1973; and Sir Olaf Caroë, The Pathans, Oxford, UK: Oxford University, 1958.

288. Johnson and Mason, “No Sign until the Burst of Fire.”

289. The genealogical veracity of such claims is not important; what is important is that the people themselves hold them as an article of faith.

290. Haroon Rashid, History of the Pathans, Vol. 1. Islamabad, Pakistan: Printo Graphic, 2002, p. 83.

291. Charles Kieffer, “Ahmadzi,” Encyclopædia Iranica. New York: Columbia University, available from www.iranicaonline.org/articles/ahmadzi-descendants-of-ahmad-sing.

292. Thomas Johnson and M. Chris Mason, “Understanding the Taliban and Insurgency in Afghanistan,” Philadelphia, PA: Foreign Policy Research Institute, Winter 2007, p. 74.

293. Abdur Rashid Qais, who is said to be the founding father of the Pashtun ethnic group.

294. Caroë, pp. iv, 11-12.

295. Jules Stewart, The Khyber Rifles: From the British Raj to Al Qaeda, Stroud, UK: Sutton Publishing, Ltd, 2005.

296. J. A. Robinson, Notes on Nomad Tribes of Eastern Afghani-stan, New Delhi, India: Government of India Press, 1935.

297. Louis Adamec, ed., Historical and Political Gazetteer of Afghanistan, Vols. 1-7. Graz, Austria: Akademische Druck - u. Verlagsanstalt, 1972; Louis Dupree, Afghanistan, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973; Henry Priestly, Afghanistan and its Inhabitants, Lahore, Pakistan: Sang-e-Meel Publications, 1981. See also Tribal Hierarchy & Dictionary of Afghanistan, a reference aid for analysts, McLean, VA: Courage Services, 2007, available from www.nzdl.org/gsdlmod?e=d-00000-00---off-0areu--00-0----0-10-

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0---0---0direct-10---4-------0-0l--11-en-50---20-about---00-0-1-00-0-0-11-1-0utfZz-8-00&a=d&c=areu&cl=CL5.9&d=HASH2a85fd9aefbb0309f2bc86.

298. Government Accountability Office, “Afghan Army Growing, but Additional Trainers Needed, Long Term Costs not Determined,” Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, January 2011, p. 18.

299. “Efforts to Recruit Pashtuns in Afghan South Falter,” The Wall Street Journal, September 12, 2010, available from www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704621204575487720827425774.

300. “Tribalism, Governance and Development Workshop Papers,” Washington, DC: U.S. Agency for International Devel-opment (USAID), July 20, 2010, p. 10, available from pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/pnaea069.pdf.

301. Giustozzi, “The Afghan National Army: Sustainability Challenges Beyond Financial Aspects,” p. 35.

302. Government Accountability Office, p. 18.

303. At the end of the 19th century, then-Afghan Ruler Abdur Rashid exiled some 10,000 Pashtuns to northern Afghanistan as punishment for defying him, where their descendants live today. Most were assimilated into northern ethnic communities; many became Dari speakers and forgot their Pashtu. Others clustered into villages of primarily Pashtun ethnicity and continue to speak Pashtu. Some number of this small element of Pashtuns living in the north of the country have found their way into the ANA. However, all of the fighting age male Pashtuns living north of the country, together, would not make up even 1 year’s recruiting quota for the army.

304. “Public Lecture and Open Discussion ‘The Afghan Na-tional Army: Sustainability Challenges beyond Financial As-pects’,” ARU, Tuesday, November 18, 2014, p. 5.

305. Government Accountability Office, “Afghan Army Growing, but Additional Trainers Needed, Long Term Costs not Determined,” p. 18.

123

306. Attributed to Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1817.

307. Interview with Professor Thomas Johnson, Naval Post-graduate School, Monterey, CA, December 10, 2014.

308. Christian Bleuer, “State-Building, Migration and Eco-nomic Development on the Frontiers of Northern Afghanistan and Southern Tajikistan,” Journal of Eurasian Studies, Vol. 3, Issue 1, January 2012, pp. 69–79.

309. House of Commons: Defence Committee,” Securing the Future of Afghanistan: Tenth Report of Session,” 2012-13, Vol. 1. London, UK: The Stationary Office Ltd, 2013, Defense Committee Evidence, Ev3.

310. “Paying for the Taliban’s Crimes: Abuses against Eth-nic Pashtuns in Northern Afghanistan,” Human Rights Watch Report, April 2002, Vol. 14, No. 2, available from www.hrw.org/reports/2002/afghan2/afghan0402.pdf.

311. Vanda Felbab-Brown, Aspiration and Ambivalence: Strate-gies and Realities of Counterinsurgency and State Building in Afghani-stan, Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2013, p. 57.

312. “Afghanistan in Transition: Crafting a Strategy for Endur-ing Stability,” Beata Górka-Winter and Bartosz Wiśniewski, eds., Warsaw, Washington, DC: The Brookings Institute, 2012, available from www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/papers/2012/5/08%20security%20afghanistan%20felbabbrown/08%20security%20afghani-stan%20felbabbrown.pdf.

313. “This is What Winning Looks Like.”

314. Murray, “Civil War Certain as ‘Afghan National Army’ Now Over 60% Tajik.”

315. See, for example, “This is What Winning Looks Like.”

316. “Instant Justice, Afghan-Army Style, Fails to Win Over Locals,” CNN April 12, 2012, available from www.cnn.com/2012/04/16/world/asia/afghanistan-air-assault/.

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317. “Afghan Army Struggles with Ethnic Divisions,” NBC News, July 27, 2010, available from www.nbcnews.com/id/38432732/ns/world_news-south_and_central_asia/t/afghan-army-struggles- ethnic-divisions/.

318. Mohammed Dauran-Ghulam Masum, Biographies of In-ternational Astronauts, available from www.spacefacts.de/bios/inter-national/english/dauran_mohammed.htm.

319. The only officer in the group with less than 100 percent certainty of ethnicity is Brigadier General Dadan Lawang. Lawa-ng replaced Major General Sayed Malouk in December 2014 in command of the 215 Corps during the ongoing crisis in Helmand Province. Lawang’s Facebook page is in Dari. He is a 25-year vet-eran of the Afghan Army, beginning under the Soviets, which vir-tually ensures he is ethnic Tajik, available from https://m.facebook.com/GeneralDadanLawang. Lawang is considered by the Ameri-cans to be a rising star in the ANA, having previously been 4th Brigade Commander in 201 Corps and the Commanding Officer of Special Forces Command and a former Commando. However, Lawang is also a Pashto word meaning “clove.”

320. “Who is Who in Afghanistan? Mohammadi, Bismillah Khan Muhammadi Bismellah Gen,” Afghan Biographies, available from www.afghan-bios.info/index.php?option=com_afghanbios&id=1068&task=view&total=2981&start=1649&Itemid=2.

321. Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet, Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2005, p. 32.

322. “Drug Problem Adding to Challenge in Afghanistan,” Chicago Tribune, January 31, 2012.

323. Antonio Giustozzi, “The Afghan National Army: Unwar-ranted hope?” RUSI Journal, Vol. 154, No. 6, 2009, p. 37, available from www.afghanjirga.net/pdf/ana.pdf.

324. Paul Lacapruccia, “Another Voice: We are wasting our time and money in Afghanistan,” The Buffalo News, December 15, 2014.

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325. “The Hashish Army—The Afghan National Army,” YouTube, 2009, available from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= mmU6S_0HVS8.

326. “This is What Winning Looks Like.”

327. “Who Will Pay for Afghan Security Forces?” Foreign Policy, June 12, 2014, available from foreignpolicy.com/2014/06/12/who-will-pay-for-afghan-security-forces/.

328. Ibid.

329. “Afghanistan Economic Update,” The World Bank, April 2014, available from www-wds.worldbank.org/external/default/WD-SContentServer/WDSP/IB/2014/04/23/000456286_20140423092911/Rendered/PDF/875740WP0Afgha00Box382171B00PUBLIC0.pdf.

330. “A Decade of Western Aid in Afghanistan—Mission Un-sustainable?” Reuters, 2014.

331. Steve Sternlieb, “Inadequate Revenue Threatens Af-ghanistan’s Stability,” Stability: International Journal of Security and Development, 2014, available from www.stabilityjournal.org/ articles/10.5334/sta.dl/.

332. “Conscription in the Afghan Army: Compulsory Service versus an All-Volunteer Force,” Arlington, VA: Center for Naval Analysis, April 2011, pp. 23-24, available from www.cna.org/sites/default/files/research/CNA%20Conscription%20in%20the%20Af-ghan%20Army%202%20--%20CRM%20D0024840.A2%20Final.pdf.

333. Conversation with Rahim Wardak at his home in Kabul, Afghanistan, in May 2002.

334. See https://www.imf.org/external/np/country/notes/afghan istan.htm.

335. Kalev Sepp, “Best Practices in Counterinsurgency,” Military Review, May-June 2005, p. 10.

336. “US Watchdog Warns of Top Seven Threats to Afghan Reconstruction,” The Express Tribune, December 10, 2014, avail-

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able from tribune.com.pk/story/804934/us-watchdog-warns-of-top-seven-threats- to-afghan-reconstruction/.

337. “Afghan Army’s Rusty Tank Relics Still Roll into Battle,” Stars and Stripes, July 20, 2014, available from www.stripes.com/afghan-army-s-rusty-tank-relics-still-roll-into-battle-1.294062.

338. Ha Mai Viet, Steel and Blood: South Vietnamese Armor and the War for Southeast Asia, Monterey, CA: The Naval Institute Press, 2008.

339. See www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/vietnam/rvn- arvn.htm.

340. Israeli M-48s met Arab T-55 tanks in battle in the Six Day War in 1967 and had little difficulty defeating them. Samuel Katz and Steven Zaloga, Tank Battles of the Mid-East Wars 1: The Wars of 1948–1973, Girardeau, MO: Concord Publishing, 1996. ISBN 978-962-361-612-6.

341. “Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) - Luc Quon,” Global Security, available from www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/vietnam/rvn-arvn.htm.

342. “Pakistani Government Refused to Move against Radi-cal Madrassas in Punjab,” The Long War Journal, May 22, 2011, available from www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2011/05/pakistani_ government_2.php.

343. “Afghan Army Struggles in District Under Siege,” The New York Times, September 11, 2013, available from www.nytimes.com/2013/09/12/world/asia/afghan-army-struggles-in-district-under-siege.html?pagewanted=all.

344. “Taliban Press for Advantage as Politicians Work on Ma-neuvers in Kabul,” The New York Times, September 28, 2014, avail-able from www.nytimes.com/2014/09/29/world/asia/taliban-presses-for-advantage-as-politicians-work-on-maneuvers-in-kabul.html.

345. “Guide to the Analysis of Insurgency,” p. 12.

346. Johnson, The Afghan Way of War.

127

347. Ibid.

348. “Taliban Overrun an Afghan Army Base.”

349. “Taliban Push into Afghan Districts that U.S. Had Secured.”

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PART II:

AFGHANISTAN YEAR-BY-YEAR 2015-19

We have an issue with the will of the Iraqis to fight [ISIS] and defend themselves. We can give them train-ing, we can give them equipment; we obviously can't give them the will to fight.1

U.S. Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter

MOTIVATION: WHY THE AFGHAN NATIONAL ARMY WILL COLLAPSE IN THE SOUTH

One, two, three, what are we fighting for?2

1960s anti-war song, “Feel like I’m Fixin’ to Die” by Country Joe McDonald

This part describes, year-by-year, what will hap-

pen in Afghanistan from 2015 to 2019 and why, us-ing the available statistics and comparable outcomes of Vietnam and Iraq and a spectrum of unclassified Afghan indicators. It examines the key reasons for the collapse of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) and the Iraqi Army, and the pending collapse of the Afghan National Army (ANA) in the south of Afghanistan. As shown in Part I, with almost no com-bat power, the Afghan National Police (ANP) will not be a military factor (see Appendix II).

All three states—South Vietnam, Iraq, and Af-ghanistan—collapsed or will collapse because their U.S.-built armies collapsed, but this alone does not explain why all three states have turned out so differ-ently from the democracies envisioned by U.S. poli-cymakers. In fact, the collapse of South Vietnam and Iraq and the inevitable collapse of Afghanistan were

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ultimately not the failures of the U.S. Army, or of the U.S. military and Navy in general. The cause lies much deeper than armies, navies, and air forces.

The armies of South Vietnam and Iraq collapsed almost immediately when confronted with military force. The ARVN ceased organized resistance within 6 weeks of a North Vietnamese Army (NVA) armored reconnaissance in force entering South Vietnamese territory, although it was qualitatively and quan-titatively superior on paper.3 We will dispense here and now with the trendy but ahistorical revisionist claim that the ARVN lost because the U.S. Congress cut ARVN funding. This simply never happened, and this falsehood has been comprehensively debunked.4 Congress never stopped funding support to South Vietnam. This misinformation was started by Melvin Laird in 2005 in a blatantly dishonest attempt to re-write history. In fact, funding to the ARVN continued to the last day of South Vietnam, and the ARVN had warehouses full of ammunition and materiel when it surrendered. No serious academic historian of the Vietnam War accepts this deliberate lie.5

The Iraqi army’s cohesion in the face of a deter-mined offensive by a small force of irregulars can be measured in hours. When a few hundred Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) militiamen attacked Mo-sul, for example, the 30,000-man Iraqi army garrison there fled, shedding their uniforms and equipment as they ran.6 After the departure of U.S. advisors, there is no reason to suggest the ANA, with half as many men and roughly twice as much territory to defend as the Iraqi Army, will fare significantly better. What caused these armies to collapse? As this part of the book will demonstrate, all three collapsed or will col-lapse for the same reasons. Indeed, the failure of all

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three was predictable, even inevitable, to dispassion-ate and objective political analysts. Furthermore, this was clear before the first local soldier entered basic training, not in hindsight but in foresight. What les-sons should have been learned from Vietnam? What lessons should now be learned again from the cur-rent military re-intervention in Iraq and the crisis in Afghanistan?

Warfare is a conflict of moral purposes. In war, as Napoleon noted, “the moral [i.e., motivation to fight] is to the physical [i.e., force size] as three is to one.”7 Carl von Clausewitz, too, emphasized the importance of the moral (motivational) aspect of war: “The moral forces are amongst the most important in war,” Clausewitz wrote, adding they constitute “the Will which puts in motion and guides the whole mass of powers, uniting [them] . . . in one stream. . . . The value of the moral powers, and their frequently incredible influence, are best exemplified by history.”8

The most serious deficit

of the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) is not its lack of an air force, extreme over-reliance on weak and static police forces, small size, nonexistent logis-tics, pervasive drug abuse, or the attrition that runs near 50 percent per year in combat units in the south, none of which substantively afflicted the ARVN to anywhere near the severity of these problems in the ANSF today. It is its lack of motivation in comparison to the Taliban.

Although there are exceptions, there is simply a general lack of will in the ANSF to fight the Tali-ban in the south at the soldier and policeman level. As Afghan War veteran and military analyst John Cook notes:

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Additional trainers are not enough to turn the situa-tion around if there is no will to win from the Afghans. The truth is the Afghan army is not very good and they won’t fight. This is where we are after ten years and billions of dollars invested in training and equipping them with state of the art technology and weapons . . . the Taliban, lacking any formal military training, poorly led and poorly equipped, often living in caves, enduring incredible hardships, shows far more fight and aggressiveness on the battlefield than the Afghan army . . . the Taliban believe in their cause enough to die for it, while the Afghan [army] soldiers do not. . . .This behavior can be traced directly to a lack of national identity and national loyalty. Nor do they have a cause they are willing to die for. . . . They are in the army for one reason only: for the money.9

The International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) attempted to control the discourse of ANA perfor-mance over the past decade with an amplified narra-tive of positive ANA operations, but the truth consis-tently leaks through in press and military reporting. In fact, the reports of this lack of fighting motivation and morale failure in the ANA are pervasive and consis-tent. Even when partnered with Americans, the ANA lacks fighting spirit. During the fight for Combat Out-post (COP) Keating in 2009, for example, known as the Battle of Kamdesh, ANA soldiers hid under their beds or looted the American barracks.10 As one American combat advisor noted:

In Afghanistan, the problem we had training the ANA was that they only really gave a shit about themselves and their tribal group. Northern Pashtuns were espe-cially bad with this. I caught a group of them smok-ing hash when they were supposed to be patrolling and their commander gave them a tongue lashing, but they really didn’t understand why they should be in-

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terested in Afghan security as a whole versus just their own village/family/friends.11

American troops are not the only ones reporting systemic ANA failure to fight. Latvian advisors sta-tioned at COP Keating told U.S. investigators the Af-ghan soldiers lacked “discipline, motivation, and ini-tiative.”12 Decorated British soldier Doug Beattie notes the ANA “refused to fight” and lacked fighting spirit during the British campaign around Garmsir in Hel-mand Province.13 British Captain Mike Martin wrote of the British campaign in Helmand that “the Afghan army in Helmand was nonexistent. The local Afghan police were, on the whole, criminal.”14

During the fighting around Marjah in 2010, Ma-rines reported the ANA lacked motivation, refused to carry out their duties, and spent their time looting the bazaar and smoking hashish.15 An embedded reporter with the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne, in Zhari district in 2010 described the ANA unit that the American troopers were operating with, the 4th Company, 3rd Brigade, 205 Corps, as “clueless and stoned.” During one firefight, the reporter observed:

few soldiers . . . seemed even to know how to fire their weapons properly. . . . As insurgent gunfire spat over-head, some soldiers stared listlessly at the sky, their hands pressed to their ears. Others crawled among the vines, huddling among the roots, dazed and disorien-tated, their weapons useless in their hands. . . . Their machine gunners had left most of their ammunition behind. They refused to provide sentries, or else slept at their posts. . . . Befuddled on hash, one machine gunner dozed off, oblivious to the firefight around him. A junior officer appeared briefly to chastise an-other group of troops for getting stoned, before he too wandered off and fell asleep, ignored by his men

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. . . . The company commander seemed to be in hiding for most of the operation while one of their platoon commanders . . . simply walked away from his men as he beat a retreat for the safety of a compound. One of the enlisted 101st Airborne troopers said ‘Look at that one,’ pointing out an ANA soldier who wandered down a vineyard track in the midst of the shooting, glassy-eyed, without any weapon. ‘I don’t know what it is with this unit, but they are worse than useless. . . . They are a complete liability’.16

An Army soldier named Andrew Carson shared COP Pirtle-King in Kunar province for a year with three different Afghan National Army platoons, observing that:

the majority of the ANA we dealt with were poorly trained, lacked discipline, and were cowards. . . . They didn’t want our help or training. It seemed that they really didn’t care about their own country. We found out that one of the platoon sergeants was getting paid by the Taliban to give them information about our movements and fire missions. He was detained and sent to Bagram. We had one of the Afghan soldiers ‘ac-cidentally’ shoot one of our M240 machine-gunners in the leg. A lot of the soldiers lacked discipline while on missions which endangered everyone with them, and a number of them would fall out of foot patrols after just half a click.17

Based on what he saw, Carson concluded that “Af-ghanistan will follow the path that Iraq has, but with less of a fight.”18 A former Battalion Sergeant Major of the North Carolina National Guard who deployed to Afghanistan put it more succinctly: “The ANA is not worth a shit,” he said, adding “there is no sense of nation or nationality in Afghanistan by the Afghan people.”19 Former U.S. Army War College (USAWC)

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Commandant Major General Robert Scales (Retired) believes that “when we leave, the ANA will scatter like leaves in a stiff breeze.”20

Fighting spirit has not improved over time. U.S. Army Sergeant First Class Keith Norris, who served as a combat advisor to the ANA in Paktika province, wrote in 2012 in Military Review that “American sol-diers consistently view their Afghan counterparts as untrustworthy, unmotivated, and inept.”21 During the fighting in Helmand in 2013, according to The New York Times, “The Afghan soldiers seldom leave the in-stallation, and mostly refuse to conduct missions—too dangerous, they say . . . American officers admit the ANA has an ‘addiction to bases’.”22 Antonio Giustozzi noted in February 2014 that the motivation of the ANA “rank and file” to fight was “dubious.”23 In June 2014, Special Forces (SFs) operating with ANA personnel in Zabul province reported the same pattern of behav-ior, including ANA soldiers refusing to help form a secure perimeter and “huddling behind rocks” during the fighting.24 The New York Times described ANA per-formance in Helmand that summer as “lackluster.”25

By the end of the fighting season in 2014, the Times said, “the cowed Afghan Army unit [in Sangin] was mostly unwilling to leave its base to confront the threat. Late last year, reports of a deal between a local army commander and the Taliban began to surface.”26 In October, The Economist described ANA morale as “low,” noting that many soldiers had not been paid for months.27 On November 29, 2014, the Taliban overran the ANA garrison in Sangin, killing 14 ANA soldiers. Another six or seven were missing in action. The ANA forces in the Sangin District Center 300 yards away from the ANA garrison did not sortie to counterattack and relieve their comrades, instead firing in the dark

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over the walls of their fort in the general direction of the garrison.28 Former Marine and former Assistant Secretary of Defense Bing West, who served in the Combined Action Platoon (CAP) program in Vietnam and spent months with Marines in Helmand province, corroborates the poor morale and poor fighting quali-ties of the ANA as well as U.S. Marines’ low regard for them across the board.29 West also noted that, while he and thousands of other Marines lived with their Vietnamese counterparts in rural villages in Vietnam, no American forces would ever live with their Afghan counterparts because of the extremely high risk of betrayal.30

Few military leaders would dispute the principle that troops with high morale and strong motivation are better and more aggressive fighters than those without. Here again, Afghanistan resembles Vietnam. There are remarkable parallels between the certainty of victory among the enemies of the state in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. In each case, the enemy’s will to fight overall was greater than that of their oppo-nents. In the case of Vietnam, a senior advisor on the Phoenix program to neutralize Viet Cong cadre, Colo-nel Jack Weissinger, interviewed hundreds of known mid-level Viet Cong officials and recorded that:

One of the underlying beliefs I have, and it is unshake-able by the way, is that there was a basic difference, possibly in the cultural background, possibly in the people, but certainly in the motivation of the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong, on one hand, and the fol-lowers of the [Government of South Vietnam] GVN on the other . . . I was struck, time and again, with the terribly strong belief they had in what they were doing. They absolutely believed, and I mean every one of them, that they were going to win eventually.

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They didn’t believe in a military victory at that time, I don’t think any of them did, but they all believed in the inevitable, final, political victory or combination military-political victory. That was a universal belief with them. It was right down inside the skin, they believed it so strongly.31

As former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara noted with hindsight and understatement in 1996:

We underestimated the power of nationalism to mo-tivate people (in this case, the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong) to fight and die for their beliefs and values—and we continue to do so today in many parts of the world.32

A parallel motivational dynamic is at work in Af-ghanistan today in relation to the Taliban. According to a British Broadcasting Corporation report in Febru-ary 2012, confirmed by NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan and the U.S. Department of Defense, interviews with thousands of Taliban detainees over a period of many years are unequivocal empirical evidence that the Taliban are utterly dedicated to battlefield victory, uninterested in any negotiated settlement, and absolutely confi-dent of the final victory of their cause. In the NATO report, confirmed and acknowledged by both Lieu-tenant Colonel Jimmie Cummings, a spokesman for ISAF in Afghanistan and U.S. Department of Defense spokesman Captain (now Rear Admiral) John Kirby, “the Taliban are absolutely confident of victory, based on 27,000 interviews with over 4,000 detainees rang-ing from senior Taliban commanders to Afghan civil-ians. They also include mid- and low-level Taliban, al-Qaeda, and foreign fighters.” Lieutenant Colonel Cummings publicly authenticated the information in

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the report, which he confirmed in a press conference represented the “opinions or ideals” of Taliban de-tainees.33 Then-Captain Kirby, in publicly discussing the document at a press conference in February 2012, confirmed that the report, called “State of the Taliban 2012,” is “the product of thousands of interviews with Taliban detainees in 2011.” Appearing before the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence one day ear-lier, on January 31, 2012, the Director of National In-telligence James Clapper confirmed that the Taliban “remains a resilient, determined adversary.”34

In Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, U.S. military officers dismissed the importance of these findings, confident of the superiority of American troops, tac-tics, commitment, and equipment. This confidence was not misplaced; in all three conflicts, the Ameri-can Soldier was a better fighter than any of his op-ponents. However, in all three wars, the confidence of higher-ranking American military officers and advisors in the fighting potential of their respective local troops and senior-level American enthusiasm for their performance was, and is, misplaced. Scales recently referred to this subjective bias toward the ANA on the part of U.S. trainers as “spin.”35 This is another similarity to the Vietnam War, according to historian Arnold Isaacs. Isaacs argues that the Richard Nixon administration embarked on a large and far-reaching information campaign to make “failure look like success,” beginning with Nixon’s famous “silent majority” speech.36

A report prepared in January 2014 by the Depart-ment of Defense (DoD) concluded that not only does the ANA lack motivation, the Afghan civilian popula-tion in many parts of Afghanistan are also sure the Taliban eventually will win, according to CNN:

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. . . dramatic increases in fighting against the Taliban have failed to convince the local population that the Afghan government and coalition forces will succeed. ‘The Taliban’s strength lies in the Afghan population’s perception that Coalition forces will soon leave, giving credence to the belief that a Taliban victory is inevi-table,’ the report says.37

In Iraq, too, the Iraqi Army lacked the will to fight, even briefly, despite overwhelming quantitative and qualitative superiority. The opponents of the Iraqi Army, the terrorist group ISIS, have a similar level of fanatical motivation to that of the Viet Cong, the NVA, and the Taliban. One ISIS terrorist noted: “I think it’s impossible that the new [Iraqi] army can defeat ISIS.” The Mosul-based terrorist added: “The [ISIS] gunmen are highly trained. They are ready to sacrifice their lives to get what they want and they are motivated by religion.”38 In comparison, the Iraqi governor of Nineveh province, Atheel al Nujaifi, says of the Iraqi Army, “the leaders and the soldiers have no military experience and have no convictions.”39

One of the primary lessons unlearned from Viet-nam, Iraq, and Afghanistan is that soldiers in the armies we create, train, and equip are simply not will-ing to fight and die for the weak, corrupt, illegitimate governments that we stand up in parallel, no matter how big they are or how much equipment we give them. As McNamara admitted in 1996, Vietnam War planners:

. . . failed to adhere to the fundamental principle that, in the final analysis, if the South Vietnamese were to be saved, they had to win the war for themselves. . . .We viewed the people and leaders of South Vietnam in terms of our own experience. We saw in them a thirst for—and a determination to fight for—freedom and

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democracy. We totally misjudged the political forces within the country.40

The ARVN that the United States created collapsed in 6 weeks, and the Iraqi Army that the United States created collapsed in 6 hours because they had neither a national sense of country nor a government—in Sai-gon or Baghdad—that its soldiers believed was worth dying for. The ANA will certainly not fare any better than the ARVN or the Iraqi Army (IA) after we leave, and for the very same reason.

WHERE DOES MOTIVATION COME FROM? THE CRITICAL LEGITIMACY FACTOR

The cafes of Vienna might seem an unlikely place to find a preeminent source of military wisdom. Yet, it was there 100 years ago that the father of modern sociology, Karl “Max” Weber, did his seminal work on legitimacy of governance, Politik als Beruf.41 Weber famously identified three basic sources of governmen-tal legitimacy, which he characterized as traditional, charismatic, and rational-legal.42 Traditional legitima-cy originates in social cultures that historically respect the authority of tradition. In this group, Weber in-cluded dynastic, hereditary leadership—monarchies and patriarchal systems—which included segmentary tribal organizations like the Pashtuns. Charismatic leadership, Weber writes, is the human response to the personal charisma of a person or an idea. Weber included religious authority in this category. “Reli-gious” leadership is self-explanatory, but would obvi-ously include, for example, as archetypes the former Caliphate of Islam and the Papacy of Catholic Europe in the Middle Ages.43 The terrorist organization ISIS

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in Iraq and Syria today seeks to claim legitimacy to rule by proclaiming itself as the new caliphate for the Muslim world, and indeed has attracted recruits from all over the world with the power of this perceived legitimacy.44 Taliban leader Mullah Omar obtained the same legitimacy by donning the sacred Cloak of the Prophet in Kandahar in 1996 and proclaiming himself the Amir ul-Mumaneen, or leader of the faithful.45 (In Central Asian culture, such articles of clothing convey enormous authority as they are believed to literally embody the power and sanctity of the original wear-er.46) Rational-legal legitimacy comes from a system of institutional procedure, wherein government in-stitutions establish order through the consent of the governed. Weber included in this category all of the forms of representative government that the democra-cies of Europe and North America today embody, and that have in common a basis in the rule of law and elective popular representation. This is the source of legitimacy of all western governments today.

The nucleus of the U.S. failures in South Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan was the political failure to have any legitimacy of governance. Despite the fact that none of the three countries ever had any experience of Weber’s third source of legitimacy, i.e., democracy and government institutions that established social order through the consent of the governed, the United States attempted to impose one in each country any-way, and deliberately excluded any other source of legitimacy.

Without exception, for 2,000 years, Afghanistan has known only the first two of these sources. Afghan-istan has been ruled by kings, emirs, and empires, including the Samanids and the Seljuk Turks, whose rule over what today is Afghanistan was endorsed by

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Abbasid Caliphs in Baghdad (in other words, tradi-tional legitimacy reinforced by charismatic legitima-cy).47 Afghanistan, for all intents and purposes, has no experience at all with the third source of legitimacy of governance, i.e., democracy, the rule of law, and rep-resentative government. The international communi-ty, in the form of the United States and the United Na-tions, led by Lakhdar Brahimi and allied with a tiny group of educated, expatriate, urban Kabuli elites, en-tered the medieval rural Afghan world of traditional and religious legitimacy in 2001 and 2002 with the so–called Bonn Process.48 Working together with one or two idealistic western scholars who shared the pa-tently false view of this handful of educated, western-ized Afghan urban elites that Afghanistan was ready for democracy, the ideologically neo-conservative U.S. Government created a new Afghan polity that comprehensively eliminated or marginalized the only two culturally acceptable sources of government le-gitimacy, the traditional and the religious. Here the United States again forgot not only the wisdom of General Douglas MacArthur regarding land forces in Asia but also his lessons from post-war Japan. MacAr-thur knew the Japanese people and culture,49 and he recognized that the beloved Japanese Emperor was a critical symbol of national unity for a defeated nation. MacArthur ensured the Emperor would remain as a ceremonial figurehead, in a role much like the monar-chy of the United Kingdom (UK).50

The monarchy in Afghanistan, although it had been in exile since 1973, nevertheless remained enor-mously popular with the Afghan people51 and con-veyed among them the critical traditional legitimacy of governance that Weber described. When King Zahir Shah spoke to the Afghan people on the radio a few

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days after the attacks of September 11, 2001, “I almost cried,” said one young man in Kabul, “you can’t be-lieve how reassuring it was just to hear his voice.” The day after the King’s address, the value of the national currency doubled. There was literally dancing in the streets. “All the ethnic groups in Afghanistan support Zahir Shah—Pashtuns, Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Hazaras,” the BBC quoted another man as saying. “All the other leaders and the armed factions couldn’t bring peace and stability, but he will,” said a third man. “Yes, we’ll welcome him,” said a fourth, “when he was our ruler, our king, we had hunger, but we had peace.” As the BBC correspondent noted, “It is actually quite dif-ficult to find an Afghan who does not want the former king back.”52 Despite the blatant obviousness of the re-turn of the King in a largely ceremonial role as the one chance Afghanistan now had for peace and stability, the United States abolished the monarchy via proxies, against the express wishes of 75 percent of the official delegates to the Emergency Loya Jirga in 2002, who signed a petition requesting King Zahir Shah be made the interim leader of Afghanistan.53 The Central Intel-ligence Agency (CIA) subverted this petition54 and had Zalmay Khalilzad browbeat the elderly king into abdicating his throne.55 As United Press International (UPI) reported at the time, “After nearly 25 years of war, democracy nearly broke out in Afghanistan on Monday, but was blocked by backroom dealing to prevent former King Mohammed Zahir Shah from emerging as a challenger to Hamid Karzai, head of the current interim government.”56

Into this void of political legitimacy in 2002 re-turned the Taliban with its religious source of legiti-macy to fill the vacuum. It had to be one or the other, the monarchy or Islam, because the third source (le-

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gal) has no legitimacy in Afghanistan. The Taliban to-day only have the support of one-third of the Afghan people,57 but they are seen as legitimate, which should not be conflated with popularity. Leaders can be seen as the legitimate leaders of their countries without be-ing popular, as American presidents from Abraham Lincoln to Barack Obama know only too well. The Bonn Process coupled this illegitimacy of democracy to a system of strong central authority, which Af-ghanistan has never accepted. In short, in Afghani-stan, the United States attempted to create something that has never existed successfully, a strong central government, based on a source of legitimacy that has never existed, democracy, by implementing a strategy of “extending the reach of the central government,” which for a thousand years has always provoked a virulent, rural, conservative insurgency based in Is-lamic models of resistance.58 At a critical inflection point in Afghanistan’s history, it was a catastrophic western diplomatic failure at the Bonn conference, not military failure, that sealed Afghanistan’s fate. After the abolition of the monarchy and the de jure estab-lishment of a highly centralized state government that gave no power to the regions, to the King or to the mullahs, there was simply never any chance of a suc-cessful outcome.

The same fundamental mistake was repeated in South Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. In each case, the United States removed unpopular leaders who were perceived to have some legitimacy to govern (Diem, Hussein, and Mullah Omar) and replaced them with unpopular leaders who were illegitimate (Thieu, al Maliki, and Karzai). In each case, grown men and women in the United States actually operated under the belief that, in primitive countries with no experi-

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ence of democracy, entire populations could be trans-formed virtually overnight into Jeffersonian demo-crats. The operating assumption was apparently that, when the people of each country somehow instinc-tively recognized the inherent superiority of western democracy over whatever they had been doing for the last thousand years, they would, in a forehead-slap-ping moment of epiphany, suddenly be enraptured by democracy and believe it to be legitimate. But the simple fact is that elections do not make democracies, democracies make elections. As retired CIA senior analyst Paul Pillar recently noted:

The cause of the political crisis in Afghanistan is . . . to be found . . . in the lack of a political culture that nur-tures the habits of thought and behavior critical to the smooth functioning of a stable democracy [including] . . . fairness, inclusiveness, and observance of impartial rules—and confidence that one’s political opponents are displaying those habits as well. A failure to recog-nize the importance of a democratic political culture . . . and the time it takes to develop one has led repeat-edly to the mistaken belief that in a troubled country (be it Afghanistan, Ukraine, Iraq, South Vietnam, or someplace else), if we just pick the right leader and give him enough support, including at times military support, stable democracy will prevail.59

All the military effort in South Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan was futile, because politically, in Saigon, Baghdad, and Kabul, there was, and is, no perception of a legitimate government that had, or has, the sup-port of the rural population and for which the people were willing to fight. It is the rural population in Af-ghanistan that matters, as Giustozzi notes, because virtually all the recruits in the ANA are from rural hamlets.60 In another critical parallel between South

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Vietnam and Afghanistan, one of the Vietnam War’s best historians, Eric Bergerud, has written that:

The . . . GVN lacked legitimacy with the rural peas-antry, the largest segment of the population. . . . The peasantry perceived the GVN to be aloof, corrupt, and inefficient . . . South Vietnam’s urban elite possessed the outward manifestations of a foreign culture . . . more importantly, this small group held most of the wealth and power in a poor nation, and the attitude of the ruling elite toward the rural population was, at best, paternalistic and, at worst, predatory.61

As Jeffrey Record notes, “the fundamental politi-cal obstacle to an enduring American success in Viet-nam [was] a politically illegitimate, militarily feckless, and thoroughly corrupted South Vietnamese client regime.”62 Like Afghanistan, South Vietnam at the government level was a massively corrupt collection of self-interested warlords, many of them deeply im-plicated in the profitable opium trade—including in both Vietnam and Afghanistan, the President’s own brother—with almost nonexistent loyalty outside the capital city beyond that which could be bought with bribery, patronage, and corruption. The purely mili-tary gains achieved at such terrible cost in our nation’s blood and treasure in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq never came close to exhausting the enemy’s manpow-er pool or his will to fight, and simply could not be sustained politically by illegitimate and dysfunctional state institutions where corrupt self-interest at every level from the minister to the desk clerk was and is the sole order of the day. As McNamara writes, “external military force cannot substitute for the political order and stability that must be forged by a people for them-selves.”63 In other words, the military cannot provide

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a national identity. Nixon’s “Vietnamization” of that conflict, President George W. Bush’s “Iraqification” of the Iraq War, and President Obama’s “Afghaniza-tion” of the Afghan War were never sustainable. As the Joint Chiefs of Staff warned Secretary of State John Foster Dulles in 1954, “Strong and stable governments and societies are necessary to support the creation of strong armies.”64 Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan were a century away from having either one.

THE FALLACY OF “NATION-BUILDING”

“Nation-building” is frequently conflated with “state-building.” It is, in political terms, a fluid con-cept that has been given multiple definitions over time by many political scientists. The definitions of nation-building and state-building themselves are the sub-jects of ongoing debates and semantic arguments, and the topic has generated a large volume of academic literature.65 As Carolyn Stephenson notes, “Nation-building is a normative concept that means different things to different people.”66 Paul Beinart for example, defines nation-building as “the use of armed force in the aftermath of a crisis to promote a transition to de-mocracy.”67 This is essentially the same definition con-trived by James Dobbins as: “the use of armed force in the aftermath of a conflict to underpin an enduring transition to democracy.”68 For the purposes of this book, however, nation-building simply refers to the evolutionary process of creating and establishing a broad, deep, and pervasive personal sense of national identity in a great majority of the population, rather than one that is centered in a localized identity: “I am a German” for example, as opposed to “I am a Bavar-ian”; or “I am an American” as opposed to “I am a Catholic” or “I am a Latino.” It is about creating a sense

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of primary personal identity that is located at the level of the nation, rather than one grounded first in region, race, religion, tribe, language, culture, or political af-filiation. As Godfrey Mwakikagile writes, “Tribalism is incompatible with nationalism, and nation-building is impossible without nationhood. And you can’t have nationhood without a genuine feeling of common citi-zenship and identity.”69

Higher levels of identity can be achieved as na-tions mature. The current political experiment of the European Union (EU) is an excellent example of how nations may seek to transcend national identities to be-gin to forge larger regional identities based on shared values and economic interests. As the struggles of the EU to create workable political and economic policies demonstrate, however, this is not an easy process. But beyond any reasonable doubt, becoming a nation is a necessary precursor stage of state maturity through which all countries must pass before transcending this 18th century concept. Tribal and sectarian societ-ies cannot leap-frog nationhood to democracy. It has never been done. Nor does nationhood always ensure unity or stability: The cases of the Basques in Spain and Scotland’s independence movement in the UK are examples of the persistence of sub-national fissures within modern, developed nations.

A state is properly defined as the governmental apparatus by which a country rules itself. Max Weber provided the classic definition of the state:

Today, however, we have to say that a state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given ter-ritory. Note that territory is one of the characteristics of the state. Specifically, at the present time, the right to use physical force is ascribed to other institutions

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or to individuals only to the extent to which the state permits it.70

By this definition, Afghanistan is neither a state nor a nation.

State-building, therefore, refers to building or re-inforcing the institutions of civil society. These might include fostering more transparent voting procedures, for example, or supporting society-state relations in the justice, education, or health care sectors. The inter-relationship between nationhood and state-building is complex. Having a national identity can itself be nuanced and subtle in mature nations. In the case of Switzerland, for example, three major ethnic groups speaking four national languages live in 26 cantons, each of which has its own constitution. Yet, there is a national army, in which all males serve, a national government, and a single currency, and the people of Switzerland think of themselves as Swiss regardless of which canton they are from. Switzerland has existed since 1291, last having been involved in a war more than 200 years ago. It has almost no natural resourc-es, yet it is prosperous, and civil unrest is virtually unknown.

Afghanistan, in contrast, has only two official lan-guages (and more than 60 unofficial ones) and three major ethnic groups (defined as comprising more than 10 percent of the population), vast mineral resources, and mountainous terrain similar to Switzerland. Yet the overwhelming majority of Afghans live in desper-ate poverty, have no sense of national identity, and have rarely, if ever, known peace, education, or jus-tice. After 13 years of American engagement, Afghani-stan in 2014 set an all-time record on the Gallup World Poll human suffering index.71 Already the worst in the

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world, Afghan suffering in 2014 reached a global his-torical high.72 In July 2014, U.S. reconstruction spend-ing in Afghanistan exceeded the Marshall Plan,73 yet, despite the United States spending $3,350 for every man, woman, and child in Afghanistan since 2002,74 it remains the poorest country in the world. As journal-ist Anna Corsaro notes, “Absolute poverty has risen by about 10 percentage points in Afghanistan since the beginning of the war; life expectancy has fallen to 44 years, [and] infant mortality has increased to reach 150 per thousand.”75 Not surprisingly, on November 18, 2014, John Sopko, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), termed the entire Afghan reconstruction effort “an abysmal fail-ure.”76 What accounts for the difference? Switzerland is a nation, Afghanistan is not.

U.S. foreign policy is relatively uncomplicated re-garding developed and developing democracies that are at peace and do not harbor international terrorists. We trade with them and, in the latter case, attempt to provide aid in the form of civilian-led programs de-signed to foster the state-building process. More re-cently, military cooperation has morphed into a major component of American foreign policy. Prior to World War II, the United States did not participate in multi-national training exercises or provide any peacetime armaments or training to foreign countries. Since the Vietnam War, in particular, the U.S. military has po-sitioned itself as a major component of state-building ostensibly limited to the sector of national defense and state security.

After World War II, what the United States did in Japan and Germany was state-building, not nation-building. Both the Germans and the Japanese already had a strong sense of national identity, indeed a

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highly militarized national identity. Both had devel-oped economies, functioning justice systems, high literacy levels, and pervasive civil order enforced by (however repugnant and unacceptable their methods) relatively corruption-free professional policing. The challenge was building enduring democratic institu-tions, not creating a national identity. Germany had experience of democracy in the Weimar Republic and a highly literate population; Japan had its beloved Emperor to sustain it through the transition. Seventy years later, the United States still has substantial num-bers of troops stationed in both countries.

After the Korean War, the United States faced a different challenge. Korea was not a defeated enemy, but an ally that had helped fight its way back from the brink of extinction to a delicate cessation of hostili-ties in which both North and South remained heavily armed and ideologically opposed. No peace treaty has ever been signed.77 The Koreans on the south of the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), like their northern brothers and sisters, were largely illiterate, poor, and underdeveloped. They did, however, have a common ethnicity, and they shared a common language and re-ligion. The sense of being Korean as a primary identity was nearly universal. They were already a nation. The challenges here, too, were state-building, and trans-forming a sense of national political identity into being specifically democratic South Korean as distinct from being (communist) North Korean. This task was com-plicated by the multitude of family ties that reached across the DMZ. Success was not easy, nor did it come quickly. Post-war Korea experienced significant polit-ical turmoil, going through six periods, or republics, before emerging in the 21st century as a liberal de-mocracy.78 The first of these, formed in 1945 after the

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surrender of Japan and known as the First Republic under Syngman Rhee, was staunchly anti-communist and was in place for 5 years before the outbreak of the Korean War.79 This continuity provided significant ad-vantages in state-building after the hostilities ended, despite Syngman Rhee’s shortcomings as an (increas-ingly) authoritarian ruler.80 Nevertheless, even given nationhood and these other advantages, stable liberal democracy and middle class prosperity took nearly 70 years to emerge, following periods of military rule, and, of course, the United States has maintained a sizeable garrison in the country since the end of World War II. During these 70 years, a more nuanced sense of national identity in the sense of being a South Ko-rean has indeed emerged without diminishing a larg-er sense of being one people and a continuing desire for peaceful reunification with the North. Today the South Korean (Republic of Korea [ROK]) Army is both powerful and imbued with an aggressive spirit and an intense will to fight. The author served in Korea and operated with the ROK Army and Marine Corps, and has never heard a U.S. military officer speak disparag-ingly about either.

All countries are different, and each is unique. It would be reductionist and simplistic to suggest that what worked in one country will work in another. Nevertheless, certain larger, strategic, historical les-sons can be drawn that should inform foreign policy. The first of these is that state-building takes a long time. Success in Germany, Japan, and Korea came about slowly during significant and unbroken 70-year U.S. military defense treaty commitments, a large U.S. force presence, and sustained economic investment. In the cases of Germany and Japan, the latter took the form of the Marshall Plan.

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The futile U.S. effort at nation-creation and con-current state-building in South Vietnam, in contrast, lasted 12 years; the attempt in Iraq, 10 years; while the effort in Afghanistan has ground on for 13 years. Even these durations are misleading; the rotation of military officers and civilian officials every 6 to 12 months meant that little expertise was accumu-lated, and little traction was sustained anywhere. As Army officer and U.S. Agency for International De-velopment official John Paul Vann famously said of America’s experience in Vietnam, “We don’t have 12 years’ experience in Vietnam. We have 1 year’s expe-rience 12 times.”81 The same is true in equal measure of Iraq and Afghanistan. The government left in place in South Vietnam lasted 3 years; the government left behind in Iraq lasted just 2 years. How long the gov-ernment left in place after the withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Afghanistan (whenever that happens) en-dures is predictable. Given its complete lack of nation-hood; its complete lack of legitimacy of governance; its unworkable “unity government”; its geostrategic location; its innumerable ethnic, sectarian, and lin-guistic fissures; the current Taliban war against the government; its completely inadequate and unmoti-vated security forces; its imploding economy and its perpetual status as a pawn in a larger game between India, Iran, and Pakistan—the 2 to 3 years of Iraq and South Vietnam, respectively, are a reasonable projec-tion. The Soviet-backed regime of President Moham-mad Najibullah also lasted 3 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the resulting cutoff of Soviet funding. What would be unreasonable would be to think that Afghanistan—with all the ethnic and sectar-ian hatreds of Iraq, multiplied by all the poverty and rural isolation of South Vietnam—will fare better than

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either did after our departure. The strategic reason for this is that all three are not nations. They were not yet or are not yet “nation-built.”

Succinctly put, nation-building is impossible. This is the single most important lesson unlearned from Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. As historian Jeffrey Clark notes, no nation, no matter how powerful, has the capacity to “reform and reshape the society of another.”82 There are no successful examples in our history of nation-building. As Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, himself a Vietnam combat veteran with the Purple Heart, recently noted:

I learned as I walked through this 12 months of war in 1968 . . . you cannot impose your will, you cannot im-pose your values, you cannot impose your standards, your institutions on other societies in other countries. It has never worked. Never will work.83

The United States has never occupied a country with troops and camped out long enough for the slow, evolutionary, internally driven social process of becoming a nation to occur. How long this process might take, under full military occupation and with complete enforced control over the building blocks of education, justice, and honest policing, as was done in the Philippines after the Spanish-American War, for example, is difficult to say. There are no precedents. The U.S. experiment in social engineering in the Phil-ippines was terminated by the Japanese Imperial Army in 1942, and the insurgency today in Mindanao and smaller southern islands rages on, despite the fact that the Philippines largely meet the test of being a nation. It is unlikely that the United States will ever commit to such a massive and naïve project of social re-engineering of the type attempted in Vietnam, Iraq,

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and Afghanistan again in the future. At least we can hope so.

In countries where nation-building, as distinct from state-building, was not necessary, due to pre-existing national identities reinforced by common languages, religions, and ethnicities (Germany, Japan, and South Korea, for example), 70 years of continuous U.S. alliance and military presence backed by defense treaties and economic investment were demonstrably sufficient. All three of these countries were already nations—they were already “nation-built.” U.S. forces are now based in these three countries, with the argu-able exception of South Korea, as much for power projection in support of U.S. global interests as they are for ensuring domestic tranquility and deterrence of external aggression.

It is true that in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, U.S. military forces in the field succeeded in temporar-ily halting enemy efforts to destabilize the countries, despite huge handicaps imposed on the U.S. military in each case by the political parameters of a limited war. But as North Vietnamese Colonel Tu apocry-phally said to Colonel Harry Summers in Hanoi in 1972, that is also irrelevant.84 In each case, there was no pervading sense in the armies of South Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan of belonging to a nation and having a legitimate government worth fighting and, if necessary, dying for. In each case, the enemy did. As McNamara notes, “our misjudgments of friend and foe alike reflected our profound ignorance of the his-tory, culture, and politics of the people in the area.”85 Or, as Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter admitted of the Iraqi Army in May 2015, “We can give them train-ing, we can give them equipment; we obviously can't give them the will to fight.”85a

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THE FUTURE OF AFGHANISTAN BY YEAR FROM 2015 TO 2019

The unanimous assessment of the intelligence com-munity as released to the public in unclassified form is that the various elements of the Taliban have zero interest in a negotiated settlement, or even in negotia-tions beyond accepting the Afghan government’s sur-render. There is no possibility of a negotiated settle-ment. None. The exchange of the Taliban military high command for the suspected deserter Bowe Bergdahl in May 2014 had less to do with the return of Bergdahl than it did with a phantasmagorical desire on the part of the Office of the President’s Special Representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan (SRAP) to prove that ne-gotiations with the Taliban were possible as an imagi-nary stepping stone to peace talks. In order to achieve the Mullahs’ specific short-term agenda, the Taliban simply gamed the Pollyannaish American negotiators who were over-eager to have “proof of concept” at any cost.86 It was the equivalent of the Union in 1862 swapping Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, James Longstreet, J. E. B. Stuart, and Nathan Bedford For-rest for a Union private who wandered away from his post. The Taliban will continue to fight well beyond the departure of the United States by January 1, 2017. U.S. airpower, now directed by U.S. SFs and special operations forces (SOF) on the ground, will continue to disrupt massed conventional Taliban attacks on ANA outposts in the Pashtun areas of Afghanistan in those places where they are deployed, and for as long as it is available.

Some readers may be put off by the certainty of the following projection, but the point of this book has been, from the outset, that this outcome is, in fact, not

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difficult to predict using sound military strategic anal-ysis, the kind of operational understanding taught at all Command and General Staff colleges, empirical tactical data, and the simple guidelines this analysis contains. Given this information, the mathematical level of probability of this projection is close to 100 percent. Here, therefore, is a year-by-year projection of what is going to happen in Afghanistan from 2015 to 2019, although the exact timing of specific tactical events may be off by some months on either side due to battlefield variables and the “fog of war.”

2015.

Because of President Obama’s recent order to ex-tend U.S. air support to the ANA, 2015 will be largely a repeat of 2014, a period of slow decay and heavy casualties for the ANA and ANP, accompanied by in-cremental and modest improvements in ANA logis-tical capability. The Taliban will continue to achieve regular tactical success with hit-and-run attacks, in-flicting casualties and seizing weapons, ammunition, and equipment as they did consistently in 2014. Op-erational success in the form of taking and holding several contiguous outlying districts is likely. Over-running a remote provincial capital with a small gov-ernment garrison, such as Parun, is possible. However, strategic success, defined here as taking and holding an entire province, and announcing the return of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA), is unlikely.

2016.

Assuming U.S. air support ends in December 2015 as is currently planned, Taliban gains in the south

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and southwest will be significant in 2016. Operational success is certain; strategic success is likely. Helmand province, in particular, is vulnerable without air support; a repeat in 2016 of the Taliban’s campaign against Sangin district in the summer of 2014 would be successful without close air support (CAS). Seizure of Lashkar Gah will be more difficult for the Taliban, as urban warfare substantially favors the defender and is best suited to the ANA’s sedentary nature. But ANA and ANP attrition will increase as momentum continues to shift to the Taliban. With attrition from the 215 Corps already running near 70 percent in 2014, the 215 Corps may simply disintegrate as four entire Iraqi divisions did at Mosul. Politically, the “unity government” established by rivals Ashraf Ghani and Abdullah Abdullah will either unravel completely or, at best, be dysfunctional, further destabilizing the sit-uation.87 If President Ghani pushes ahead with whole-sale removal of officials and officers he believes to be corrupt in 2015, as he did on December 28, 2014, in firing more than 30 senior officials in Herat, including 15 district police chiefs,88 major civil unrest in Kabul, Kandahar, Herat, and Mazar-i-Sharif is probable in 2016. Ousted warlords and power brokers may well incite their followers to violent protest. This will fur-ther distract and disaffect the security forces, some of whom will be tempted to take sides or consider the option of a coup, as happened during the election impasse in August 2014.89 Iranian military support in the form of weapons and money to the Hazaras in the Hazarajat region will pose a diplomatic challenge for the United States similar to the situation in Iraq today.

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2017.

As currently planned, December 31, 2016, will mark the departure of all foreign troops and support from Afghanistan, beyond a robust Office of Defence Assistance group in the U.S. Embassy. After that, the almost entirely Tajik ANA’s position in the south and east will be militarily untenable. Surrounded by a countryside effectively owned by the Taliban; crippled by desertions; and unable to communicate, resupply, or reinforce, the garrisons of the 215th ANA Corps will collapse. The Taliban will achieve strategic suc-cess, as defined for this book. Helmand, Zabul, Uruz-gan, Nimruz, Ghazni, and perhaps Wardak provinces will fall to the Taliban. Taliban leadership will an-nounce the return of the IEA to Afghanistan. With the exception of parts of Kandahar province and Kanda-har itself, the ANA 205 Corps will also collapse in the south. Barring assassination, however, the formidable Chief of Police of Kandahar Province Lieutenant Gen-eral Abdul Raziq will be hard to dislodge.90 The extent to which this can be controlled as an orderly strategic withdrawal, preserving portions of the 215 and 205 Corps to fight again, as opposed to complete disinte-gration (as was seen with the Iraqi Army in 2014), will be critical to establishing a stable defensive line and de facto partition.

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Map II-1. Tactical Situation in 2017.

The front will be a rough west-east line north of the Helmand River valley and eastwards to the Hindu Kush. Control of Kabul, with its symbolic importance as the capital city, will be contested. The current Tali-ban build-up in Wardak and Kapisa provinces in 2014 attests to the Taliban’s intent to capture the city, and the almost daily attacks in Kabul in November 2014 may be seen as probes testing the city’s defenses. Fighting in Wardak to keep the Taliban out of rocket and artillery range of Kabul will be intense. The CIA will have extensive evidence of Pakistani Army sup-port to the Taliban inside Afghanistan, and one of the first challenges for the next U.S. President taking of-fice in January 2017 will be deciding how to deal with

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this provocation. The United States will belatedly ad-dress this security crisis, and, as it did a year too late in Iraq due to misplaced faith in the Iraqi Army, the U.S. security policy apparatus will be forced into a crisis mode again to decide how to return to support the re-mainder of the ANA, and determine who in Afghani-stan could be our Afghan equivalent of the Kurdish Peshmerga.91

2018.

The establishment of a de facto partition between Taliban-held Pashto-speaking Afghanistan and gov-ernment-held Uzbek- and Dari-speaking northern Afghanistan will depend to a significant degree on the speed of the return of U.S. CAS and the extent of the presence of U.S. forward air controllers (FACs) in the form of SF/SOF teams inserted with those el-ements of the ANA still considered to be reliable. A very similar situation pertains in Iraq today. The ANA commando battalions are a leading candidate, as they are the best the Afghans have got. The Hazaras are another possibility. However, the Tajik, Uzbek, and Hazara remainder of the ANA will now be fighting on their own territory, defending their own homes and families, and their resistance will stiffen as it did from 1996 to 2000. Evacuation of the U.S. embassy and the embassy annex by air from Kabul to Mazar-i-Sharif is likely, as the fighting will be close to Kabul. There will be helicopters on the embassy roof again. Other re-gional players, including Iran92 and Tajikistan,93 have already expressed deep concern over the prospects of a Taliban government on their borders again and may intervene in the form of substantial military aid to northern armed groups.

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2019.

The primary issue in 2019 will be who controls Kabul. Expeditionary U.S. air support operating from Shindand and Bagram air bases will be spread much thinner than is the case in Iraq today because of Af-ghanistan’s far greater size, and sorties from an air-craft carrier in the Indian Ocean will have to traverse either Iranian or Pakistani airspace, with consequently shorter loiter times on station. As a result, there will be a greater reliance on drones.

Taliban territorial control in the south and east, however, now becomes a strategic liability for them, as it forces Taliban leadership to return from exile in Karachi, Peshawar, and Quetta or become irrelevant. This now exposes them to punishing U.S. air strikes. When they are no longer in densely populated Paki-stani cities and closely guarded by the ISI, they can be targeted. This is the potential game-changer to induce the Taliban to accept “half a loaf” and agree to a bifur-cated state. As a result of the U.S. ability to target and kill senior Taliban leadership for the first time when they return to Afghan soil, a quid pro quo may become possible in which the Taliban agree to establish their state capital in their spiritual capital city, Kandahar, which houses the sacred Cloak of the Prophet, and to leave Kabul to the north. Pakistan may consider half of Afghanistan sufficient strategic depth, although some scholars believe Pakistan’s fear of the old dream of a Pashtunistan will drive Pakistani resistance to parti-tion, as it could be a precursor to a Pashtun national independence movement.

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Map II-2. Tactical Situation in 2019.

Realistically, however, in a sound analysis, there is very little chance of a serious revival of the Khu-dai Khidmatgar (Red Shirt) Pashtunistan movement.94 The level of political support for the Awami Work-ers’ Party (AWP) in Pakistan, let alone for the more nationalistic offshoot Pakhtunkhwa Milli Awami Party, compared to the religious and political power of the Taliban is negligible. In the 2002 elections, the AWP received only 11.1 percent of the votes for the National Assembly and 9.4 percent of the votes for the Provin-cial Assembly.95 In 2013, in the general elections, it de-clined still further, receiving only 5 percent of the vote in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.96 In 2015, the AWP has only six of the 99 regular seats in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Assembly.97 This is not the stuff of a mass popular

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movement. The realpolitik of the relative power rela-tionship between the AWP and the Tehrik-i-Taliban (TTP) in the Pashtun areas of northern Pakistan today is illustrative of this dynamic. The Deobandi Islamist construct is fundamentally incompatible with Pash-tun nationalism and a Pashtun nation—as are, indeed, the Pashtuns themselves.

If not, the war will go on and, because of a lack on both sides of mobile supporting arms, may even be-come World War I-like in its static nature. Either way, the end state will eventually be de facto partition and a ceasefire along a brokered line of control that could eventually become a negotiated de jure partition, with residual U.S. air power at Bagram and Shindand as the enforcer, creating an armed stand-off of the type in the Koreas today. Another imperial map will have to be redrawn.

ENDNOTES - PART II

1. “US Defense Chief: Iraqis ‘Showed No Will to Fight ISIS in Ramadi’,” ABC News, May 24, 2015, available from abcnews.go.com/Politics/us-defense-chief-iraqis-showed-fight-isis-ramadi/story?id=31273453.

2. “Country Joe and the Fish,” The Well, available from www.well.com/~cjfish/game.htm.

3. George Veith, Black April: The Fall of South Vietnam, 1973-75, New York: Encounter Books, 2013.

4. Ken Hughes, “The Myth That Congress Cut Off Funding for South Vietnam,” History News Network, Washington, DC, The George Mason University, April 28, 2010, available from his-torynewsnetwork.org/article/126150.

5. Ibid.

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6. “Raising an Army: Ten Rules,” War on the Rocks, July 14, 2014, available from warontherocks.com/2014/07/raising-an-army-ten-rules/#_.

7. John Lewis, Nothing Less Than Victory, Princeton, NJ: Princ-eton University Press, 2101, p. 3.

8. Carl von Clausewitz, On War. London, UK: Penguin Books, 1982, pp. 251-252.

9. John Cook, Afghanistan: The Perfect Failure, Bloomington, IN: XLIBRIS: 2012.

10. Lardner, Richard, (Associated Press), “Investigation: Af-ghan Troops Ran, Hid During Deadly Battle,” Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, June 11, 2011.

11. “Two Vets Who Deployed to Mosul Iraq,” Reddit. Entry by “lostkeysblameHofmann,” available www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2gk0kh/i_we_are_two_vets_who_deployed_to_mosul_iraq_matt/.

12. “Afghan Soldiers Ran, Hid during Attack,” The Boston Globe, June 11, 2011, available from www.boston.com/news/world/asia/articles/2011/06/11/afghan_soldiers_ran_hid_during_attack_us_report_says/?camp=pm.

13. Doug Beattie, An Ordinary Soldier, London, UK: Pocket Books, 2009.

14. Mike Martin, An Intimate War: An Oral History of the Hel-mand Conflict 1978-2012, London, UK: C. Hurst & Co Publishers Ltd, 2014.

15. “After Push in Marja, Marines Try to Win Trust,” The New York Times, February 28, 2010, available from www.nytimes.com/2010/03/01/world/asia/01marja.html?pagewanted=all.

16. “Clueless and Stoned: How US Forces See Their Lo-cal Comrades,” The London Times, October 5, 2010, avail-able from www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/world/asia/afghanistan/ article2752743.ece.

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17. “NATO “Mission Complete” in Afghanistan,” Nine Line, January 9, 2015, available from www.ninelineapparel.com/nine-line-news/nato-mission-complete-in-afghanistan/.

18. Ibid.

19. “Get Out,” petrblt, November 3, 2010, available from https://petrblt.wordpress.com/2010/11/03/get-out/.

20. “Green Berets Reveal Afghan National Army Soldiers’ Incompetence: Reports Say ANA Troops Hide from Battle, Can’t Lead or Fight at Night,” Washington Times, October 26, 2014, avail-able from www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/oct/26/green-berets-tell-of-afghan-national-army-soldiers/?page=all.

21. SFC Keith Norris, U.S. Army, “ The Afghan National Army: Has Capacity Building become Culture Building?” Military Review, November-December 2012, p. 32.

22. “Afghan Army Struggles in District Under Siege,” The New York Times, September 11, 2013, available from www.nytimes.com/2013/09/12/world/asia/afghan-army-struggles-in-district-under-siege.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0.

23. Antonio Giustozzi, “The Afghan National Army: Sustain-ability Challenges Beyond Financial Aspects,” Kabul, Afghani-stan: Afghan Research and Evaluation Unit, February 2014, p. 1.

24. “Green Berets Reveal Afghan National Army Soldiers’ Incompetence.”

25. “Taliban Mount Major Assault in Afghanistan,” The New York Times, June 27, 2014, available from www.nytimes.com/2014/06/28/world/asia/taliban-mount-major-assault-in- afghanistan.html.

26. Ibid.

27. “Being Led From Behind,” The Economist, October 1, 2014, available from www.economist.com/blogs/banyan/2014/10/ afghanistans-army.

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28. “Taliban Overrun an Afghan Army Base,” The New York Times, November 29, 2014.

29. Bing West, A Million Steps, New York: Random House, 2014.

30. Ibid.

31. Eric Bergerud, The Dynamics Of Defeat: The Vietnam War In Hau Nghia Province, Boulder, Co: Westview Press, 1993, p. 303.

32. Robert McNamara, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam, New York: Vintage Books, 1996, p. 322.

33. “NATO Report Says Taliban Captives Are Confident of Victory,” The Los Angeles Times, February 1, 2012, available from latimesblogs.latimes.com/world_now/2012/02/nato-report-says-taliban-captives-are-confident-of-victory.html.

34. “Open Hearing: Current and Projected National Security Threats to the United States,” U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, January 31, 2012, available from www.intelligence. senate.gov/hearings/open-hearing-current-and-projected-national- security-threats-united-states-0#hrg.

35. “Green Berets Reveal Afghan National Army Soldiers’ Incompetence.”

36. Arnold Isaacs, Without Honor: Defeat in Vietnam and Cambo-dia, Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins Press, 1998.

37. Available from www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/asiapcf/11/23/us.afghanistan.taliban/.

38. “Iraq Army’s Ability to Fight Raises Worries,” The Wall Street Journal, June 22, 2014, available from online.wsj.com/articles/iraq-armys-ability-to-fight-raises-worries-1403484149.

39. Ibid.

40. McNamara, pp. 996, 322, 333.

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41. Karl “Max” Weber, Politik als Beruf (Politics as a Vocation), Leipzig, Germany: Duncker & Humblot, 1926.

42. Ibid.

43. Morris Bishop, The Middle Ages, New York: Mariner Books, 2001.

44. “ISIS Jihadis Lure Arab Youths to Fight against Western Forces,” Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, October 11, 2014, available from triblive.com/usworld/betsyhiel/6948198-74/isis-says-abu#axzz3L LjUaGYZ.

45. “A Tale of the Mullah and Muhammad’s Amazing Cloak,” International New York Times, December 19, 2001, available from www.nytimes.com/2001/12/19/international/asia/19CLOA.html.

46. Stewart Gordon, ed., Robes of Honour: Khilat in Pre-Colonial and Colonial India, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2003.

47. Andrew Petersen, Dictionary of Islamic Architecture, New York: Routledge, 1996, p. 120.

48. “International Peacebuilding: An Analysis of Peacemak-ing in Afghanistan,” Atlantic-Community.org, May 21, 2010, avail-able from www.atlantic-community.org/app/webroot/files/articlepdf/ International%20Intervention,%20an%20Analysis%20of%20Bonn%20Political%20Settlement%20in%20Afghanistan.pdf.

49. History Learning Site, available from www.historylearning-site.co.uk/douglas_macarthur.htm.

50. John Dower, “The Showa Emperor and Japan’s Postwar Imperial Democracy,” Japan Policy Research Institute (JPRI) Working Paper No. 61, Cardif, CA: JPRI, October 1999, available from www.jpri.org/publications/workingpapers/wp61.html.

51. “No Ordinary Homecoming,” BBC News, April 17, 2002, available from news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/1936041.stm.

52. Ibid.

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53. “Afghanistan Needs A Hero: How A Unifying National Leader Can Bring Peace,” Huffington Post, June 14, 2010, available from www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-hughes/afghanistan-needs-a- hero_b_610622.html.

54. Thomas Johnson and Chris Mason, “Refighting the Last War: Afghanistan and the Vietnam Template,” Military Review, November-December 2009, Endnote 11, p. 14, available from usacac.army.mil/CAC2/MilitaryReview/Archives/English/Military Review_20091231_art004.pdf.

55. Selig Harrison, “Afghanistan’s Tyranny of the Minority,” The New York Times, August 16, 2009, available from www.nytimes.com/2009/08/17/opinion/17harrison.html?_r=0.

56. “Afghan Council Postponed, King Steps Aside,” United Press International, June 10, 2002, available from www.upi.com/Business_News/Security-Industry/2002/06/10/Afghan-council-post-poned-king-steps-aside/UPI-62001023745673/.

57. “Afghanistan in 2013: A Survey of the Afghan People,” Washington, DC: The Asia Foundation, 2013, available from asia-foundation.org/country/afghanistan/2013-poll.php.

58. Bryan Carroll and David A. Anderson, “Afghanistan Gov-erned by a Federal System with Autonomous Regions: A Path to Success?” The Long War Journal, 2009, p. 29.

59. Paul Pillar, “Afghanistan Election Crisis: “Likely Fraud on a Million-Vote Scale Is a Big Gap to Bridge,” The National Inter-est, July 20, 2014, available from nationalinterest.org/blog/paul-pillar/afghanistan-political-culture-strikes-again-10847.

60. “Public Lecture and Open Discussion, ‘The Afghan Na-tional Army: Sustainability Challenges beyond Financial As-pects’,” ARU, Tuesday, November 18, 2014, Kabul, Afghanistan: Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit, p. 5.

61. Bergerud, p. 3.

62. Jeffrey Record, “How America’s Own Military Perfor-mance in Vietnam Aided and Abetted the ‘North’s Victory’,”

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Marc Jason Gilbert, ed., Why the North Won the Vietnam War, New York: Palgrave, 2002, p. 119.

63. McNamara, pp. 322, 333.

64. Ronald Spector, Advice and Support: The Early Years, 1941-1960, Stockton, CA: University Press of the Pacific, 2005, p. 379.

65. See, for example: Karl Wolfgang Deutsch, William J. Folt, eds., Nation Building in Comparative Contexts, New York: Atherton, 1966.

66. Carolyn Stephenson, “Nation Building,” Beyond Intracta-bility, January 2005, available from www.beyondintractability.org/essay/nation-building.

67. Paul Beinart, The Good Fight: Why Liberals, and Only Liber-als, Can Win the War on Terror, New York: HarperCollins Publish-ers, 2006, p. 198.

68. James Dobbins, “Nation-Building: the Inescapable Re-sponsibility of the World’s Only Superpower,” Santa Monica, CA: RAND Review, Summer 2003.

69. Godfrey Mwakikagile, Statecraft and Nation Building in Africa: A Post-colonial Study, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania: New Africa Press, 2014, p. 14.

70. Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” Hedwig Gerth and Freya Mills, eds., From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, New York: Oxford University Press, 1946. p. 48.

71. “Suffering in Afghanistan Hits Record High—for Any Country,” Gallup World Poll, December 5, 2014, available from www.gallup.com/poll/179897/suffering-afghanistan-hits-global-record-high.aspx.

72. Ibid.

73. “U.S. Aid to Afghanistan Exceeds Marshall Plan in Costs, not Results,” The Los Angeles Times, July 31, 2014, available from www.latimes.com/world/afghanistan-pakistan/la-fg-afghanistan-us-aid-outlook-20140731-story.html.

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74. Spending in July 2014 reached $104 billion dollars, and the population of Afghanistan in 2014 is approximately 31 million people: $104 billion divided by 31 million = $3.350.00.

75. “Afghanistan: Triumph or failure?” The Daily Journalist, January 3, 2015, available from thedailyjournalist.com/elcafe/afghan-istan-triumph-or-failure/.

76. “SIGAR: Pentagon’s Economic Development in Af-ghanistan ‘Accomplished Nothing’,” Defense News, November 18, 2014, available from www.defensenews.com/article/20141118/DEFREG03/311180053/SIGAR-Pentagon-s-Economic-Development- Afghanistan-Accomplished-Nothing-.

77. “Korean War Armistice Agreement,” FindLaw, July 27, 1953, available from news.findlaw.com/cnn/docs/korea/kwarma-gr072753.html.

78. Clay Blair, The Forgotten War: America in Korea, 1950-1953, New York: Times Books, 1987.

79. Richard Allen, Korea’s Syngman Rhee: An Unauthorized Portrait. North Clarendon, VT: Charles E. Tuttle, 1960.

80. Ibid.

81. Kendall Gott, Security Assistance: U.S. and International His-torical Perspectives, Fort Leavenworth, KS: Combat Studies Insti-tute Press, 2006, p. 178.

82. Jeffrey Clark, Advise and Support, the Final Years 1965-1973, Washington, DC: Center of Military History, U.S. Army, 1988, p. 521.

83. “Hagel: Vietnam War’s lessons still echo today,” Military Times, January 22, 2015, available from www.militarytimes.com/story/military/pentagon/2015/01/22/hagel-interview/22161401/.

84. Richard Halloran, “Strategic Communication,” Parameters, Carlisle PA: The Strategic Studies Institute and The U.S. Army War College Press, Autumn, 2007, p. 4.

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85. McNamara, p. 322.

85a. “US Defense Chief: Iraqis ‘Showed No Will to Fight ISIS in Ramadi’.”

86. “The Truth Behind the Bowe Bergdahl POW Prisoner Swap,” Newsweek, June 3, 2014, available from www.newsweek.com/truth-behind-bowe-bergdahl-pow-prisoner-swap-253218?piano_t=1.

[T]here appears to be far more at stake here than the return of Bergdahl, and this also may be part of a three-dimension-al diplomatic chess game. Their future has been important in negotiations between the Afghan government, the United States and the Taliban in resolving the conflict.

87. Chris Mason, “Fraud and Folly in Afghanistan,” Foreign Policy, September 23, 2014, available from www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&frm=1&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CB4QFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fforeignpolicy.com%2F2014%2F09%2F23%2Ffraud-and-folly-in-afghanistan%2F&ei=ITyGVNWdB8mwggSC2YOQCA&usg=AFQjCNHrAdmQMyKFVO-RYYQV_bxiINb8ag&bvm=bv.80642063,d.eXY.

88. “President Sacks 30 officials in Herat,” Pajhwok News Agency, December 28, 2014, available from www.pajhwok.com/en/2014/12/27/ghani-herat-evaluate-security-governance.

89. Matthew Rosenberg, “Amid Election Impasse, Calls in Af-ghanistan for an Interim Government,” The New York Times, Au-gust 18, 2014, available from www.nytimes.com/2014/08/19/world/asia/amid-election-impasse-calls-in-afghanistan-for-an-interim-govern-ment.html?_r=0. Rosenberg was declared persona non grata and deported for his story.

90. “Powerful Afghan Police Chief Puts Fear in Taliban and Their Enemies,” The New York Times, November 8, 2014, avail-able from www.nytimes.com/2014/11/09/world/asia/powerful-afghan- police-chief-puts-fear-in-taliban-and-their-enemies-.html.

91. Mason.

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92. Sumitha Narayanan Kutty, “Iran’s Continuing Inter-ests in Afghanistan,” The Washington Quarterly, June 2014, available from elliott.gwu.edu/iran%E2%80%99s-continuing- interests-afghanistan.

93. “ISAF Withdrawal from Afghanistan to Make Tajikistan Strengthen Border Security,” TASS, October 15, 2014, available from itar-tass.com/en/world/754567.

94. Mohammad Raqib, “The Muslim Pashtun Movement of the Northwest Frontier of India, 1930-1934,” Maria J. Stephan, ed., Civilian Jihad: Nonviolent Struggle, Democratization, and Governance in the Middle East, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, p. 112.

95. Andrew Wilder, “Elections 2002,” Craig Baxter, ed., Pakistan on the Brink: Politics, Economics, and Society, Oxford, UK: Lexington Books, 2002, p. 121.

96. “Election 2013: A Right Wing Victory,” International View-point, May 20, 2103, available from www.internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article2971.

97. Government of Pakistan, Provincial Assembly of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, available from official website, www.pakp.gov.pk/2013/.

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PART III:

THE STRATEGIC LESSONS UNLEARNED FROMVIETNAM, IRAQ, AND AFGHANISTAN

The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie—deliberate, contrived, and dishonest—but the myth—persistent, persuasive and unrealistic.1

John F. Kennedy

IMPEDIMENTS TO STRATEGIC JUDGMENT

Neck deep in the Big Muddy, and the big fool said to push on.2

Pete Seeger

Controlling the message in warfare is as old as warfare itself. At Baghdad, in 1401, Tamerlane had his warriors build a tower of 90,000 severed heads to assist the city’s population in assessing the pros and cons of resistance or surrender.3 Expressions of con-fidence in victory are a part of war, whether they are called public affairs, strategic messaging, psychologi-cal operations, information warfare or propaganda, in the old, more positive, pre-Nazi connotation of the word.4 One would hardly have expected International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) commanders to say publicly “the Afghan National Army is terrible” when the audience included the Afghan National Army (ANA), the enemy, and Afghan civilians. This Ameri-can foreign policy by messaging is deliberate, simplis-tic, repetitive, and pervasive. For the withdrawal from Afghanistan, in 2010 administration message crafters

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came up with a year-by-year public “narrative.” As Jack Fairweather notes:

a U.S. PowerPoint presentation laid out what the West hoped would be the ‘Key Tenets of the Afghan Nar-rative:’ ‘2011/12, Notice what is different; 2012/13, Change has begun; 2013/14, Growing confidence; 2015, A new chance, a new beginning’.5

Reviewing the media reporting on Afghanistan since 2011, one can clearly see administration officials sticking to these talking points and repeating them in unison.

The danger to which civilian and military leaders alike are increasingly prone, however, is coming to be-lieve in their own public messaging as if it were actu-ally true, and making decisions based on it as if it were reality and not wishful thinking about how we would like the world to be. This optimism afflicted ISAF of-ficers in general and National Military Training Cen-ter-Afghanistan (NMTC-A) officers in particular.6 For a decade, notes a senior Afghan analyst, “whenever a problem with the ANA was raised, the typical re-sponse of NMTC-A was that ‘we have a plan to solve that completely, so that isn’t a problem anymore’.”7 A problem was no longer a problem if a staff officer had developed a plan to fix it, accompanied, naturally, by more positive messaging.

A corollary danger lies in the natural human desire to report success up the chain of command, and to de-sign or modify metrics in a way that appears to support positive momentum. The author of this book attended many Afghan Interagency Operations Group (AIOG) meetings at which considerable pressure was applied and arguments made to upgrade unpleasant “yellow” (not so good) boxes on the color-coded “Progress Met-

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rics” chart to “green” (good), to indicate up the chain of command that progress was assuredly being made. This, too, is a venerable aspect of warfare. When faced with the unhappy task of reporting an unbroken se-ries of defeats to the Chinese Emperor in the 19th cen-tury, Mandarin officials arrived upon the solution of simply describing them all as victories.8 A similar ap-proach was taken in Vietnam, where “body counts” were notoriously inflated, and the daily Pentagon re-ports of battlefield success were dubbed the “Five o’ Clock Follies” by a press corps no longer finding them credible.9 Briefings on Afghanistan sometimes seem to emulate both the Mandarin and the Five o’ Clock Follies solutions. As Anthony Cordesman notes:

Since June 2010, the unclassified reporting the U.S. does provide has steadily shrunk in content, effective-ly ‘spinning’ the road to victory by eliminating content that illustrates the full scale of the challenges ahead. They also . . . were driven by political decisions to ig-nore or understate Taliban and insurgent gains from 2002 to 2009, to ignore the problems caused by weak and corrupt Afghan governance, to understate the risks posed by sanctuaries in Pakistan, and to ‘spin’ the value of tactical ISAF victories while ignoring the steady growth of Taliban influence and control.10

The Afghan Ministry of Defense (MOD) press of-fice has copied the art. The frequent press statements from the Afghan MOD in Kabul exaggerating the number of Taliban killed in operations are known lo-cally to the few foreign journalists still covering the war as the “Panj o’ Clock Follies,” using the Dari word for “five.”11 The war by messaging in English is also going strong, using the “Key Tenets of the Afghan Narrative” message plan adopted by the administra-

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tion, with “Growing confidence” the message theme for 2014.12 In a briefing on December 2, 2014, for exam-ple, ISAF spokesman Lieutenant Commander Justin Hadley told reporters “the Afghan National Security Forces are becoming more capable and stronger each day.”13 As has been shown, statistics indicate that just the opposite is true.

More recently, the outgoing commander of ISAF, Lieutenant General Joseph Anderson, said he was confident the Afghan police and army could prevent the Taliban from regaining territory next year. “This country is safer and more prosperous than ever,” he said. “The insurgents have been beaten back and the Afghan National Security Forces are carrying the fight to the enemy.”14 In fact, no part of this statement is sta-tistically true: The country is not safer than ever: Tali-ban attacks and Afghan civilian deaths both reached a new record high in 2014, according to the United Na-tions.15 The country is not more prosperous than ever: Afghanistan not only remained the poorest country in the world despite reconstruction spending which has surpassed the Marshall Plan, it also set a historical re-cord in 2014 for the most human suffering in modern world history.16 Absolute poverty has risen by about 10 percentage points in Afghanistan since the begin-ning of the war. Life expectancy has fallen to 44 years, and infant mortality has increased to reach 150 per thousand.17 The Afghan economy is shriveling.18 The insurgents have not been “beaten back,” (a somewhat disingenuous statement in itself, as one must wonder, if they have never been winning, why were they being “beaten back”?) the Taliban now control more territo-ry than ever.19 And the security forces are not carrying the fight to the enemy: they are more sedentary, less mobile, and conducting fewer patrols and offensive

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operations than ever before.20 As Phillip Münch of the Afghan Analysts Network noted in January 2015:

Observers frequently describe the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) as rather passive and defen-sive, with the usually better paid and supplied special forces often being the only forces who regularly take offensive action.21

After 13 years and a trillion dollars spent,22 security is so bad in the capital city that the flag-furling ceremo-ny for Operation ENDURING FREEDOM had to be held in secret at an undisclosed location in Kabul out of concern that the ceremony would be attacked by the Taliban.23 The main roads in the capital are so un-safe that “[North Atlantic Treaty Organization] forces often fly by helicopter over the 5-10 [kilometers] from the coalition headquarters to the capital’s military air-port because of the threat of suicide bombers on the roads.”24

Again, the reasons for this public position are obvious, but this approach carries with it the corol-lary danger that Americans and Afghans alike will, in fact, believe all is well, and Afghans in particular will not be moved to the sense of urgency and the kind of national mobilization necessary at this point to combat the Taliban. Noting this kind of danger, a January 2011 report by the Afghan Nongovernmental Organization (NGO) Security Office in Kabul advised foreigners working in Afghanistan that its assessment of the security situation was:

sharply divergent from [ISAF] ‘strategic communi-cation’ messages suggesting improvements. We en-courage [nongovernment organization personnel] to recognize that no matter how authoritative the source

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of any such claim, messages of this nature are solely intended to influence American and European public opinion ahead of the withdrawal, and are not intended to offer an accurate portrayal of the situation for those who live and work here.25

In fact, such “strategic messaging” generally be-fuddles both our Afghan allies and our enemies in Pakistan.26 Coming from a completely different cul-ture in which not dissembling and politeness rank equally high, Afghan civilians and most senior offi-cers outside the press office are often baffled why U.S generals would say things they know are not true. The Pakistanis, on the other hand, ever fond of conspiracy theories,27 ask of the ANA, “why has the U.S. sunk bil-lions of dollars in a project that had no chance to deliv-er?”28 One Inter Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI) theory is that, since much of the ANA training and infrastructure development was carried out by former American military personnel working as contractors, there was money to be made in the ANA training business.29 The ISI and the Pakistani Army have other conspiracy theories about resources and dark U.S. intentions in Central Asia, but until recently, appar-ently, they did not consider the possibility that U.S. of-ficers might actually believe what they were saying.30 As former ISI Lieutenant General Asad Durrani put it:

[until] recently I had believed that the U.S. was too smart not to know about the ANA’s limits and was pumping it up as a ruse. But since an American friend of mine who is a keen observer of the Afghan scene is convinced that the ANA could carry out its mission with some help from its mentors, it is quite possible that Washington too has faith in this role.31

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The same messaging was a constant feature of the war in Vietnam. Just as U.S. officials today are point-ing to the escalating casualties suffered by the ANSF as proof of their fighting spirit, senior U.S. officials in Vietnam “cited the death of ‘approximately ten thousand Vietnamese’ through 1962 as proof of their willingness to prosecute the war.”32 Defeats like the Battle of Ap Bac were described as victories. Admiral Harry Felt (Commander in Chief Pacific [CINCPAC] from 1958 to 1964) told reporters in Saigon that Ap Bac “was a Vietnamese victory—not a defeat as the papers say.”33 As historian David Toczek notes:

CINCPAC was not only sure of a [South] Vietnamese victory at Ap Bac, but he also believed in total victory, proclaiming that ‘I am confident the Vietnamese are going to win their war.’ Despite the ‘recent casualties suffered by Vietnamese forces at Ap Bac,’ the war in Vietnam [CINCPAC said] was ‘taking a generally fa-vorable course.’34

When American war correspondents reported on the Army of the Republic of Vietnam’s (ARVN) “lack of aggressiveness,” as is seen in the ANSF today, Commander US Military Assistance Command Viet-nam (COMUSMACV) General Paul Harkins praised them and emphasized their casualties.35 This positive messaging continued right up until the end of the war. On November 21, 1967, COMUSMACV General William Westmoreland told U.S. news reporters the United States was winning in Vietnam. “I am abso-lutely certain that whereas in 1965 the enemy was winning,” Westmoreland said, “today he is certainly losing.”36 In 1970, as the United States was preparing to withdraw from Vietnam, President Richard Nixon told the American people that “progress in training

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and equipping South Vietnamese forces has substan-tially exceeded our original expectations last June. . . . Very significant advances have also been made in pacification.”37

The same optimism of messaging seen in Afghani-stan and Vietnam also pervaded the creation of the Iraqi Army as well. In 2006, the Armed Forces Journal reported that “in fighting spirit, small-unit tactics and discipline, the fledgling Iraqi army has made substan-tial progress.”38 In testimony before the House Armed Service Committee in January 2008, Commander of the Multi-National Security Transition Command-Iraq, Lieutenant General James Dubik, stated:

The Iraqis are proud of what they are accomplishing. They are proud of themselves, and they are commit-ted to their own success. And we are meeting with some success, Mr. Chairman. The Iraqi Security Forces are bigger and better than they have been at any time since the effort to establish them began. I attribute this to three things . . . the rejection of Al Qaeda and oth-er extremists by much of the Iraqi population. More people want to serve. More people feel invested in their own futures . . . we have seen significant growth across the board. We are seeing the Iraqi’s want to take more responsibility for the battlespace . . . It is money well spent. 39

Six months later, Dubik told Congress, “There has been huge progress. There has been significant im-provement in every possible way you can measure it” and reported the Iraqi Army would be proficient to take over its own security in 2009.40 In May 2008, Anthony Cordesman at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) stressed the “need to rec-ognize that very real progress is being made.”41 Late

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in 2009, U.S. Army Colonel Fred Kienle, an Iraqi Army trainer, gushed that:

They’re all soldiers. What we find is, particularly the Iraqi soldiers are patriots. They are risking their lives to be soldiers, as most soldiers do, but them particu-larly . . . they see a new Iraq. They’re committed to what they’re doing.42

In fact, none of this messaging reflected reality, but so deeply had this positive public messaging pervad-ed the public sphere, and so convinced were military leaders by it, that many were shocked when the Iraqi Army collapsed in 2014. Jessica Lewis, a former Army intelligence officer and the director of research at the Institute for the Study of War, said, for example, “the fact that the four ISF [Iraqi Security Forces] northern divisions were overrun or collapsed with almost no resistance is extraordinary, and hugely alarming.”43 “The U.S. military worked incredibly hard in the 2005-08 time frame to build the ISF into a professional, na-tional force that represented all Iraqis,” echoed retired Lieutenant General David Barno, “and the fact that . . . [it] folded so fast when confronted with Islamic extremists is a very dangerous development.”44 Com-pany and field grade officers with closer knowledge of the U.S. effort in Iraq and less exposure to the talking points, however, were not taken by surprise. “They weren’t soldiers because they wanted to be soldiers,” explained Marine First Lieutenant Dave Jackson, who fought with Iraqi forces during his two deployments to Iraq. “They were soldiers because they wanted a job.”45 A Marine colonel, who asked to remain anony-mous because he is on active duty, said that after their own families, the soldiers and leaders were loyal to their tribes and then their religion. “Iraq as a nation

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falls at the bottom of the list. Combine this with lack of cohesion, unity, loyalty, and camaraderie among themselves, and you have an organization that will disintegrate under pressure.”46 The fact that Iraq is not a nation, and never has been, and the fact that there was in reality nothing in Baghdad that the men of the Iraqi Army were going to fight and die for, made this outcome entirely predictable. It was a strategic repeti-tion of South Vietnam.

What causes the disconnect between rational intel-ligence assessments made by seasoned intelligence professionals and the optimistic positions of military officers? In some cases, it is a result of confirmation bias, the remarkable psychological phenomenon in which many people, when presented with facts that show their positions and views to be completely wrong, actually reinforce their wrong beliefs rather than changing them.47 Another factor is bureaucratic “groupthink”—the tendency of people involved in a decision to try to sense which way a decision is shap-ing up and then make sure to be on board and stay on board with the eventual decision. The author ob-served this as a major factor in foreign policymaking in the interagency on Afghanistan from the middle levels up. Groupthink is defined as occurring:

when a desire for conformity within a group tran-scends rational thought and issues of right and wrong. When this happens, individuals in a group fail to express their doubts about the group’s dynamic, di-rection or decisions because of a desire to maintain consensus or conformity. Thus the group may be on a headlong rush to error or disaster and no-one speaks up because they don’t want to rock the boat. Group-think can affect communities of any size from small groups to whole nations.48

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In other words, savvy bureaucrats and politicians can sense which way a decision is taking shape and often feel compelled to be on the “winning side” of the policy argument. Dissent is not career-enhancing. Individuals, too, can be affected by what is known as the “blind spot bias”—the inability of persons to see confirmation bias and groupthink within themselves.

Another danger is bureaucratic path dependency. Path dependency is defined as a state of organizational inertia and the historical imprinting of decisionmak-ing by which organizations lose their flexibility and become inert or even locked in.49 Experts in organi-zational dynamics say this happens in three phases. Phase I, the “Preformation Phase,” is characterized by a broad scope of action. In Phase II, the “Formation Phase,” a dominant action pattern emerges “which renders the whole process more and more irrevers-ible.” Choices and options narrow, and “it becomes progressively difficult to reverse the . . . initial pattern of action.” Phase III, the “Lock-in Phase,” occurs when the dominant decision pattern becomes fixed and gains a deterministic character; eventually, the actions are fully bound to a path. One particular choice or ac-tion pattern has become the predominant mode, and flexibility has been lost. Even new entrants into this field of action cannot refrain from adopting it. U.S. Government policy is particularly vulnerable to this process.50 Capturing this dynamic in 1983, historian Arnold Isaacs summarized the reasons for failure in Vietnam in his history of the final years of the war as follows:

Misperceiving both its enemy and its ally, and im-prisoned in the myopic conviction that sheer military force could somehow overcome adverse political cir-cumstances, Washington stumbled from one failure to the next in the continuing delusion that success was

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always just ahead. This ignorance and false hope were mated, in successive administrations, with bureau-cratic circumstances that inhibited admission of error and made it always seem safer to keep repeating the same mistakes, rather than risk the unknown perils of a different policy.51

The intellectual habits of thought of military insti-tutions also tend to become predictable and calcified. The same thing has occurred in Afghanistan today. As Afzal Amin notes:

. . . the personality type (in psychological terms) fa-vored across NATO in terms of recruitment, train-ing, promotion and retention is the linear-thinking process-focused maintainer of the status quo, which was ideal for holding back the Soviets while keeping our force readiness at optimum levels. We didn’t want mavericks and non-conformists so we didn’t have them. But for the wicked problems that were Iraq and Afghanistan, mavericks were precisely what we need-ed, the problem-solvers and the independent thinkers. Recognizing our own limitations is both wise and nec-essary. We must learn from the institutional failure to gain victory in Afghanistan if we are to have any hope that the escalating crises in Iraq and Syria are to be resolved any time soon.52

GUIDELINES FOR FUTURE WARS

He was impregnably armored by his good intentions and his ignorance.53

Graham Greene, of Alden Pyle, the idealistic Central Intelligence

Agency (CIA) agent in his novel, The Quiet American

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What should elected leaders, civilian officials, and military officers consider when future military intervention is proposed? First, nation-building is impossible, except perhaps in the negative sense: if you invade a country, you may unite them in tempo-rary opposition to you and foster a more nationalistic identity. But the Afghans have united to eject a lot of invaders over the last 2,000 years and it has not made them a nation. Be wary of collaborators telling you what you want to hear. In any coercive environment, there will always be the Chalabis, al Malikis, Karzais, Khalilzads, Kys, and Thieus on the weaker side ready to collaborate with the stronger, but usually only for their own personal self-aggrandizement.54 Before seri-ously considering military intervention (as opposed to humanitarian relief, for example) in a foreign country that will require the extended presence of U.S. troops (for example, longer than 90 days), the best academic experts in the United States should be summoned to provide an assessment of the extent to which the people of that country have a developed sense of na-tionhood. If a country has not reached a point where nation-building is no longer necessary, conventional military intervention involving occupation should be off the table, because failure in that environment is inevitable, as Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan clearly prove. Successful state-building cannot occur until a country has reached the “nation-built” stage of devel-opment, and nation-building cannot be done by any foreign country. It is, by definition, a slow, evolution-ary, internal social process.

Second, state-building is possible, but it is best done by civilians, and it takes between 70 and 100 years to go from poverty, illiteracy, and economic under-development to a liberal democracy with stable

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economic growth. The role of the military is to defend it, not to build it. Germany, Japan, and Korea are proof of this. The nations of Central Europe and Eastern Eu-rope have undoubtedly benefited greatly in terms of political and economic progress by their membership in NATO, the presence of small numbers of NATO forces, and the guarantee of security provided by Ar-ticle 5. In no case in Central or Eastern Europe, how-ever, was nation-building necessary, and a steady and reliable influx of Western support, including trade and defense commitments, provided a jump start on post-communist state-building. The Ukraine, on the other hand, was clearly not “nation-built.” The key in such cases would be understanding the lengthy time span of military commitment required, the nature of that commitment, and the degree to which the people of the country in question would support a long-term U.S. military peacekeeping presence. Not all nations are pro-American.

Third, peacekeeping is possible, but coercive peace-creating in a failed state is not. The U.S. inter-ventions in Somalia and Lebanon come to mind. An international peacekeeping presence could work, for example, in a post-Castro Cuba. No nation-building would be required—Cubans have a strong sense of being Cuban. American troops might be represented along with those of Cuba’s Latin neighbors—Cubans have no great dislike for the United States,55 despite 60 years of a misguided economic embargo.56 The political turmoil that inevitably follows the collapse of communism in a country with no democratic his-tory could be stabilized by an international military presence that prevents the vacuum from being filled by undemocratic opportunists in the army or police forces or by wealthy carpetbaggers from Florida. Such

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a stability presence could allow a legitimate indige-nous process to develop democratic tendencies over a period of several decades. This is not to advocate such a policy, merely to provide a real world example of a nation where state-building, backed by extended military peacekeeping, could assist a nation in transi-tion if properly considered and planned, and all the necessary conditions pre-exist (i.e., a permissive envi-ronment, a receptive population, a functioning justice system, reasonable literacy levels, and a strong sense of nationhood). Needless to say, however, the assis-tance in building civil institutions should be done by civilians, not the military.

Finally, what do these lessons from South Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan say about the future role of the U.S. Army and the U.S. military? What larger overall lessons should be learned from Germany, Japan, and Korea—and Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan? What missions should the U.S. military of the future be pre-pared to carry out? The answer is primarily two-fold: First is the ability to conduct long-term peacekeeping operations, such as the one in South Korea, which re-quire a substantial, benign military presence in bar-racks ready to go to war against an aggressor liter-ally at a moment’s notice with intense lethality—“to fight,” as the current expression has it, “outnumbered and win.”

The second function is essentially expeditionary: To be able to go into a country where events have dramatically threatened American citizens and/or Americans interests, strike a military target hard in a way that will change the balance of power in favor of moderate indigenous elements, and get back out within 90 days. Why? Because staying longer does not help where nationhood does not exist. Operation

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DESERT STORM is a textbook example of this kind of intervention, but the U.S. Army will rarely have a year to prepare for a designer war and a carefully choreo-graphed walkover in the future.

On the other hand, 8 years in Vietnam, 11 in Iraq, and 13 in Afghanistan did not change the outcome or made it worse. All were ill-considered, because none were nations. In each case, the adversaries of America’s nation-creation illusion were and are stron-ger than the united will of the indigenous people to fight for it. Ho Chi Minh was more committed to a reunited Vietnam than he was to communism, as Of-fice of Strategic Services (OSS) advisor Archimedes Patti, Foreign Service Officer Paul Kattenburg, and others reported.57 Saddam Hussein was a horrible human being, but he kept the lid on Iraq’s volcanic internal dynamics, kept Iran in check, and allowed no terrorists on his soil. Rural Afghanistan is a 14th century society that is several centuries at best from being a nation ready for state-building. It may never be. Bangladesh, East Timor, Eritrea, and South Sudan all exist today because a unified Pakistan, Indonesia, Ethiopia, and Sudan were never going to be nations within their existing colonial maps. It is heresy to the State Department,58 which has always fought against it, but sometimes the best way to solve a problem is to draw a new map.

CONCLUSIONS

U.S. foreign policy and military engagement in any part of the world should hinge first and foremost on the extent to which the country under consider-ation is a nation. The first corollary to this book might be that the greater the extent to which a country is

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a nation, the lesser the probability that U.S. military engagement will be ever considered or needed there, because instability can largely be graphed in parallel with nationhood. Many definitions have been offered by political scientists for the term “nation,” but for the purposes of this book, the word will mean a country in which a broad majority of the people identify them-selves at a national level. In other words, a country in which, when asked, the great majority of the people would answer the questions “Who are you?” and “Where are you from?” with the names of their coun-tries: “Peru,” for example, or “Switzerland,” rather than by any more localized identities, such as clan, tribe, ethnicity, religion, or linguistic group.

This is, of course, a very superficial definition; the concept of nationhood and identity are complex and fluid. The sense of national identity should not be conflated with pride in nationality; these are quite different. However, for the purposes of discussion, it provides a readily understandable and easily es-tablished baseline on which to plot a country’s social and political development. It is the kind of litmus test that anyone can apply and, if answered objec-tively and honestly, casts the country in question into clear focus. Indeed, it could easily be plotted on a linear graph.

In Vietnam, the CIA planned and carried out a coup in 1963, which inadvertently resulted in the as-sassination of South Vietnamese President Ngô Đình Diem and his brother.59 This was followed by a pro-longed period of coups and instability. In Afghani-stan in 2001, the United States invaded to remove the Taliban from power, then subverted the will of the Af-ghan people, prevented the Afghan King Zahir Shah from returning to the throne in a ceremonial role as a

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symbol of national unity to confer legitimacy on the state, and refused the Taliban’s offer of surrender.60 Because Plan A, Abdul Haq, was betrayed to the Tali-ban by the ISI and killed in 2001,61 an Afghan political nonentity named Hamid Karzai was placed in power instead because he was the only other Afghan the CIA had on its payroll.62 In Iraq, the United States invaded in 2003 to remove Saddam Hussein from power and have him hanged after a fair trial. (Hussein’s defense attorney noted that “this court is a creature of the U.S. military occupation, and the Iraqi court is just a tool and rubber stamp of the invaders.”63 As The Washing-ton Post observed, “Americans have drafted most of the statutes under which Hussein and his associates are being tried.”64 Amnesty International called the trial “deeply flawed and unfair.”65) The U.S. Govern-ment then conspired to install Nouri al-Maliki as the Prime Minister of Iraq.

None of these deliberately planned foreign poli-cies of regime change and armed nation-creation dur-ing civil wars (Vietnam and Afghanistan) or in barely contained civil wars (Iraq) worked out well. (To these three could be added the U.S. intervention in a civil war in Somalia in 1992, the U.S. intervention in a civil war in Lebanon in 1983, and the U.S. overthrow of the nationalist leader Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran in 1954 to put the Shah in power.) Diem was unpopular but his successors were worse, and their corruption and incompetence fueled the Viet Cong insurgency. Hamid Karzai turned out to be a corrupt, incompetent, and mentally unstable milquetoast, and his failure to even try to reign in his kleptocracy and reduce opium production, from which his own family made billions of dollars,66 aided the rise of the many tentacles of the Taliban comeback. In Iraq, Nouri al-Maliki took none of the steps required to build trust and a sense of in-

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clusion among Iraq’s religious factions, especially the majority Sunni Muslims, and instead concentrated power among his own Shia minority,67 giving rise, first, to a Sunni insurgency that claimed the lives of thousands of American Soldiers, and ultimately to the radical Sunni terrorist group, Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). In all four cases of deliberate U.S. regime change by force and installing our man in power in Asia in the past 50 years (including Iran), the results have been catastrophically and diametrically opposed to those intended.

In Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, there were American experts who advised, or would have ad-vised if they had been consulted, against all of these courses of action. Yet, in most cases, the Americans who knew these countries best were either not spo-ken to, not heeded, or deliberately excluded from the room at the time these fateful decisions were being made. In the case of Vietnam, Patti, for example, knew Ho Chi Minh well, having fought with him against the Japanese in Vietnam during World War II. Patti advised that Ho could be one of our most important post-war allies in Asia, and his commitment to com-munism was skin deep.68 As Patti later recalled:

In my opinion the Vietnam War was a great waste. There was no need for it to happen in the first place. At all. None whatsoever. During all the years of the Vietnam War no one ever approached me to find out what had happened in 1945 or in ‘44. In all the years that I spent in the Pentagon, Department of State, in the White House, never was I approached by anyone in authority. However, I did prepare a large number, and I mean about, oh, well over fifteen position papers on our position in Vietnam. But I never knew what happened to them. Those things just disappeared, they just went down the dry well.69

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Paul Kattenburg was another unheeded Vietnam expert. Kattenburg served in Vietnam in the late-1950s and early-1960s and knew the country as well as any American alive. On August 31, 1963, Katten-burg dissented at a meeting of senior Kennedy ad-ministration officials which prepared the ground for sending in U.S. combat troops, including Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Maxwell Taylor, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, National Security Ad-viser McGeorge Bundy, and the President’s brother and Attorney General Robert Kennedy. Kattenburg told them the expanded U.S. war would fail, the South Vietnamese were already tired of the war, and that Diem was secretly negotiating with the north. Kat-tenburg later wrote, “[T]here was not a single person there that knew what he was talking about.”70 Taylor, who wanted a war in Vietnam, challenged him, while Rusk derided Kattenburg’s statement as ‘‘specula-tive.”71 Bundy knew Kattenburg was telling the truth because he had received a very similar report from his trusted aide, Michael Forrestal, just weeks before, but said nothing.72 Kattenburg was never invited to another policy meeting.73

How, one wonders, is this possible? In a nation populated with the world’s leading experts on most foreign countries, how can critical foreign policy de-cisions be made that often deliberately exclude those experts who do not agree with the proposed policy? The answer is, sadly, that the policymakers do not want them there. In the case of Vietnam, for example, outgoing U.S. Ambassador to Saigon Frederick Nolt-ing argued in late-August 1963 against a coup. Few Americans knew Vietnam better than Nolting.74 He, too, was ignored. The disregard for the advice of experts on Vietnam was subsequently borne out by

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former Secretary of Defense and chief architect of the Vietnam War Robert McNamara. In 1993, McNamara addressed the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. As Bruce Nussbaum notes, McNamara told the audience:

he had made a mistake. The protesters had been right all along. The war was unwinnable from the start. The domino theory was ridiculous. Nationalism had been confused with communism. There had never been a serious threat to U.S. security.75

When an audience member asked McNamara why he did not listen to the experts, “McNamara smiled down from the podium and said: ‘. . . they weren’t in our circle’.”76

There also were, and are still today, tightly closed “circles” for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The list of military and government civilian experts opposed to the Iraq War was extraordinarily long and deep.77 Again, an administration determined to have a war was not interested in the views of American experts who warned that Saddam Hussein was not a nice man, but he was sitting on the lid to Pandora’s Box and keeping Iran in check, and that removing him would destabilize the entire region. In regard to Afghanistan, days after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, American-born Middle East journalist Eric Margolis wrote a piece entitled “Spare Afghanistan from U.S. ‘Nation-Building’” in the Toronto Sun:

In all my years as a foreign affairs writer, I have nev-er seen a case where so many Washington `experts’ have all the answers to a country that only a handful of Americans know anything about. President George Bush, who before election could not name the presi-

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dent of Pakistan, now intends to redraw the political map of strategic Afghanistan, an act that will cause shock waves across South and Central Asia. Anyone who knows anything about Afghans knows . . . they will never accept any regime imposed by outsiders. . . . Washington’s plan for `nation-building’ in Afghani-stan is a recipe for disaster that will produce an en-larged civil war that draws in outside powers.78

Other American experts and Foreign Service Of-ficers counseled against the notion of nation-creation in Afghanistan and the administration’s approach. While serving as the representative of the Bureau of Political Military Affairs (PM) to the ad hoc Afghan policy group in 2001 and to the Afghan Interagency Operations Group (AIOG) thereafter, for example, the author wrote a Briefing Memo in November 2001 to James Dobbins strongly urging that King Zahir Shah be returned to Kabul in a largely ceremonial role and laid out the reasons why. It was neither answered nor heeded. Dobbins had never been to Afghanistan and knew nothing about the country, but he and his inner coterie knew better.79

These “circles” are not naturally occurring phe-nomena. Politicians, bureaucrats, and generals make them. Agreement with the policy is generally the cri-teria for admission to the circle. Groupthink rules. Once inside the circle, groupthink is compounded by the kind of “participant compliance” found by experts like Dr. Muller Weitzenhoffer in stage hypnosis carni-val acts, wherein members are compliant because of the social pressure felt in the environment constructed in the briefing room.80

The most disturbing interpretation of Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan is that senior leaders had al-ready formed a consensus of what they wanted to do

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in a given foreign policy situation to fit it into a larg-er, overarching ideology, and were not interested in contrary views and advice. It is well-documented, for example, that then-Secretary of Defense McNamara wanted a war in Vietnam and deliberately withheld critical information about the second (nonexistent) at-tack in the Gulf of Tonkin on August 4, 1964.81 It is also a well-known and well-documented part of the his-tory of the run-up to the invasion of Iraq that within 48 hours of the attacks of September 11, 2001, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld instructed his intelligence analysts to “find a connection to Iraq.”82 Another unlearned strategic lesson of Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan is the need to open the “circles.” Indeed, perhaps law should require it in order to in-crease transparency, give American civilian experts from outside of government a greater opportunity to provide advice and counsel, and counterbalance ad-ministration war hawks. The genetic inbreeding of foreign policy seldom ends well.

The U.S. military has influence over all of these po-tential pitfalls in deciding foreign policy. Perhaps more so than is the case in any other mature democracy, the U.S. military is itself included in the formulation of policy. In most democracies, foreign policy is crafted by civilian elements of a nation’s foreign ministry in consultation with elected leadership, and, if a solution to a problem is believed to involve military operations, the military leadership of that country is then called in and tasked with carrying out the intent of govern-ment. In the United States, senior military leadership is involved in policymaking from the beginning. This, perhaps not surprisingly, has resulted in the foreign policy of the United States arriving at military solu-tions more often than is the case with most of our

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democratic allies around the world. Whether or not it is the result of the military-industrial complex that President Dwight Eisenhower warned the American people about, the U.S. Government prioritizes war over peace. There are more military personnel play-ing in military bands today for military parades than there are State Department diplomats in total around the world trying to prevent conflict.83

But as a result of this greater engagement in poli-cymaking, the U.S. military is poised, almost uniquely among our friends in the world, to be able to push back against all of the potential systemic flaws in de-cisionmaking that involve the use of military force. If the State Department, the National Security Council, and the CIA are not consulting outside academic ex-perts, the Department of Defense certainly can. In a political system in which the military is not simply given a tasking but in fact helps craft the tasking, it has considerable bureaucratic leverage in the final prod-uct. One must ask: Why was the U.S. military willing, even eager, to rush into Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq with ground troops and carry out complex mili-tary operations in those countries without inviting top experts into the room who would have said, “No, you really don’t want to do that”? Real leadership means surrounding yourself with people who will tell you your plan is bad, not sycophants eager to tell you it is great. In the end, if all else fails, as retired Marine of-ficer Frank Hoffmann suggests, “When civilian policy masters will not establish the necessary conditions for strategic success, military officers can retire, resign, or request reassignment.”84

When the problem is a military one, the confi-dence, aggressive spirit, and determination to find a way to win embodied by American military and naval

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officers are the qualities that make the United States a deadly foe in battle. When the problem is political, however, they can become an impediment to strate-gic vision. American military and naval officers are taught from their first day in training to take care of the men and women under their command and not to squander their lives. In total, 65,069 American Sol-diers, Sailors, Airmen, and Marines lie dead from the wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, all of which were predictable and predicted strategic failures. As this book has shown, they are all dead because the “circle,” as McNamara termed it, was closed, experts were deliberately excluded from policymaking be-cause they did not concur with prevailing groupthink, and senior officers went along for the ride to do their best with the mission they were given. The most out-spoken critics of America’s military, like Lieutenant General Herbert McMaster,85 retired Colonel Andrew Bacevich,86 and former Marine Lieutenant Colonel Frank Hoffman, have criticized the military establish-ment, or the officer corps, for not standing up to civil-ian leaders, for being too willing to try to get the job done, or for being, in Hoffman’s harsh words, “yes men.”87 Some extreme critics have even gone as far as suggesting that America is becoming a new Sparta, where endless wars give professional officers a chance to prove their skills and reach higher rank.88

The correct courses of action—leaving Diem in power and helping him find an acceptable path to re-unification, possibly under a “one country, two sys-tems” approach of the type used in Hong Kong, for example; allowing Afghanistan’s king to return to the throne as 75 percent of the country demanded, and then allowing the Afghans to sort out their own gov-ernment; and leaving Saddam Hussein in power as an

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unsavory alternative to obviously far worse potential futures—were, in fact, all recommended by experts in each case before these decisions were implemented. The cost in blood and national treasure resulting from not listening to them is almost incalculable. At the end of the day, each of these tragedies was the result of an almost willful overreach of national power in coun-tries which were not and are not yet nations. What his-torian George Herring wrote of Vietnam could stand as the epitaph of all three interventions: “an enduring testament to the pitfalls of interventionism and the limits of power.”89 The lessons for senior military of-ficers are clear, but the question remains: will they be learned this time?

ENDNOTES - PART III

1. Speech given for the Yale University commencement on June 11, 1962, Charlottesville, VA, University of Virginia Miller Center, available from millercenter.org/president/speeches/speech-3370.

2. Victor Wallis, “Song and Vision in the U.S. Labor Move-ment,” Eunice Rojas and Lindsay Michie, eds., Sounds of Resis-tance: The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, Vol. 2, Santa Bar-bara, CA: ABC-CLIO, LLC, 2013, p. 55.

3. William D. Rubinstein, Genocide, New York: Routledge, 2014, p. 28.

4. E.g., information or ideas that are spread by an organized group or government to influence people’s opinions.

5. “Afghanistan: Coming to the Bad End of the Good War,” War on the Rocks, Washington, DC, December 16, 2014, available from warontherocks.com/2014/12/afghanistan-coming-to-the-bad-end-of-the-good-war/?singlepage=1.

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6. “ISAF Officer Brushes Off Increased Afghan Death Toll,” Trans Radio News Service, March 20, 2013, available from www.talkradionews.com/pentagon/2013/03/20/afghan-security-transition-update.html#.VJX1DAFABg.

7. Interview with author, November 12, 2014.

8. Beatrice Bartlett, conference paper “Opening Up the Ar-chives,” New Haven, CT: Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, p. 8, available from isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic98010.files/bbartlett.pdf.

9. “The Press: Farewell to the Follies,” Time, February 12, 1973, available from content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171, 903831,00.html.

10. Anthony Cordesman, Afghanistan and the Uncertain Met-rics of Progress: Part One: The US Failures That Shaped Today’s War, Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and International Stud-ies (CSIS), February 22, 2011, available from csis.org/publication/afghanistan-and-uncertain-metrics-progress-part-one-us-failures-shaped-todays-war.

11. Author’s conversation with a foreign journalist in Kabul, Afghanistan, December 6, 2014.

12. “Afghanistan: Coming to the Bad End of the Good War.”

13. “Afghanistan’s Heavily Guarded Capital No Longer Im-mune from Violence,” Stars and Stripes, December 2, 2014, avail-able from www.stripes.com/news/afghanistan-s-heavily-guarded- capital-no-longer-immune-from-violence-1.316436.

14. “Five killed in Afghanistan as Taliban Storm Kandahar Police Station,” Reuters, December 8, 2014, available from www.reuters.com/article/2014/12/08/us-afghanistan-attack-idUSKBN0J-M1AE20141208.

15. “Civilian Deaths in Afghanistan Reach New High in 2014: UN,” World Post, in conjunction with the Huffington Post, Decem-ber 20, 2014, available from www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/19/civilian-deaths-afghanistan_n_6355856.html.

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16. “Suffering in Afghanistan Hits Record High—for Any Country,” Gallup World Poll, December 5, 2014, available from www.gallup.com/poll/179897/suffering-afghanistan-hits-global-record-high.aspx.

17. “Afghanistan: Triumph or failure?” The Daily Journal-ist, January 3, 2015, available from thedailyjournalist.com/elcafe/ afghanistan-triumph-or-failure/.

18. “Worsening Security in Afghanistan,” Express Tribune, December 15, 2014, available from tribune.com.pk/story/806721/worsening-security-in-afghanistan/.

19. “Taliban Making Military Gains in Afghanistan,” The New York Times, July 26, 2014, available from www.nytimes.com/2014/07/27/world/asia/taliban-making-military-gains-in- afghanistan.html.

20. “Green Berets Reveal Afghan National Army Soldiers’ In-competence: Reports Say ANA Troops Hide From Battle, Can’t Lead or Fight at Night,” The Washington Times, October 26, 2014, available from www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/oct/26/green-berets-tell-of-afghan-national-army-soldiers/?page=all.

21. Phillip Münch, “Operation Resolute Support,” Afghan Analysts Network, p. 7, available from https://www.afghanistan-an-alysts.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/20150112-PMuench-Resolute_Support_Light.pdf.

22. “How the War in Afghanistan Went So Wrong,” The London Evening Standard, January 8, 2014, available from www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/books/how-the-war-in-afghanistan-went-so-wrong-9965733.html.

23. “One Sentence that Shows How Badly America Failed in Afghanistan,” Vox, December 29, 2014, available from www.vox.com/2014/12/29/7464111/afghanistan-war-failure.

24. “Smaller NATO Mission Has Big Job to Train Afghan Army in Time,” Reuters, January 6, 2015.

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25. “Truth, Lies and Afghanistan,” Armed Forces Journal, Feb-ruary 1, 2012, available from www.armedforcesjournal.com/truth-lies-and-afghanistan/.

26. See Carlotta Gall, The Wrong Enemy, New York: Hough-ton-Mifflin, 2014.

27. “Pakistanis Love Conspiracy Theories,” Deutsche Welle, October 16, 2012, available from www.dw.de/pakistanis-love- conspiracy-theories/a-16307473.

28. Musa Khan Jalalzai, Whose Army? Afghanistan’s Future and the Blueprint for Civil War, New York: Algora Publishing, 2014, Foreward.

29. Ibid.

30. Ibid.

31. Ibid.

32. David Toczek, The Battle of Ap Bac, Vietnam: They Did Ev-erything But Learn from It. Monterey, CA: Naval Institute Press, 2007, p. 123.

33. Ibid.

34. Ibid.

35. Ibid.

36. General William Westmoreland statement to the press, November 21, 1967, The History Channel, available from www.history.com/this-day-in-history/westmoreland-tells-media-the- communists-are-losing.

37. “Presidential Statement: Nixon’s Televised Vietnam Speech,” CQ Almanac Archives, available from library.cqpress.com/cqalmanac/document.php?id=cqal70-1290853.

38. “Building an Iraqi Army,” Armed Forces Journal, January 1, 2006, available from www.armedforcesjournal.com/building-an-iraqi-army/.

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39. “Statement of Lieutenant General James Dubik, U.S. Army, Commander Multi-National Security Transition Com-mand—Iraq on Iraqi Security Forces January 17, 2008,” avail-able from www.loc.gov/resource/lcwa00010250.7uxr4YUdhYeHLxxEyPYgBw/#?time=20090902070721&url=armedservices.house.gov%2Fpdfs%2FFC011708%2FDubik_Testimony011708.pdf.

40. “Iraqi Forces Estimated to Become Proficient in ‘09,” USA Today, July 9, 2009, available from usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/washington/2008-07-08-3418976217_x.htm.

41. Anthony Cordesman, “Iraqi Force Development 2008,” Washington DC: CSIS, 2008, available from csis.org/files/media/csis/pubs/080527_isf_report.pdf.

42. “Iraqi and US Soldiers Build New Iraqi Army,” Voice of America, October 29, 2009, available from www.voanews.com/content/a-13-2005-02-14-voa57-67523017/386980.html.

43. “Understanding Iraq’s Disappearing Security Forces,” The National Journal, June 19, 2014, available from www.national-journal.com/white-house/understanding-iraq-s-disappearing-security- forces-20140619.

44. Ibid.

45. “Veterans Not Surprised Iraq’s Army Collapsed,” Al Jazeera, June 28, 2014, available from america.aljazeera.com/watch/shows/america-tonight/articles/2014/6/28/how-did-iraq-s-armycollaps-esoquickly.html.

46. “The Iraqi Army Never Was,” The American Conservative, October 9, 2014, available from www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-iraqi-army-never-was/.

47. D. Ariely, Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions, New York: HarperCollins, 2008.

48. Definition of “groupthink,” The Rational Wiki, available from rationalwiki.org/wiki/Groupthink.

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49. Jörg Sydow and Georg Schreyögg, “Organizational Path Dependence: Opening the Black Box,” Academy of Management Review, Vol. 34, No. 4, 2009, pp. 689–709.

50. Ibid., pp. 691-692.

51. Arnold Isaacs, Without Honor: Defeat in Vietnam and Cambo-dia. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins Press, 1998.

52. Afzal Amin, “In Afghanistan the West Suffered from In-stitutional Failure. Let’s Learn from It,” The Guardian, October 28, 2014.

53. Graham Green, The Quiet American, New York: Penguin Books, 1957, p. 163.

54. See, for example, Mikolaj Kunicki, “Unwanted Collabora-tors: Leon Kozłowski, Władysław Studnicki, and the Problem of Collaboration among the Polish Conservative Politicians in World War II,” European Review of History: Revue européenne d’histoire, Vol. 8, Issue 2, 2001, pp. 203-220.

55. “Dispelling Four Misconceptions about Travel to Cuba,” The Huffington Post, April 13, 2013, available from www.huffington-post.com/peggy-goldman/traveling-to-cuba_b_3062395.html.

56. “It’s Time for the U.S. to End Its Senseless Embargo of Cuba,” Forbes Magazine, January 16, 2013, available from www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2013/01/16/its-time-for-the-u-s-to-end-its-senseless-embargo-of-cuba/.

57. Interview with Archimedes L. A. Patti, 1981, available from openvault.wgbh.org/catalog/vietnam-bf3262-interview-with-ar-chimedes-l-a-patti-1981.

58. State Department opposed to creation of East Timor, see Noam Chomsky, “East Timor Retrospective,” Le Monde Di-plomatique, October, 1999, available from www.chomsky.info/articles/199910--.htm; State Department opposed to breakup of Yugoslavia, see Matjaž Klemenčič, “The International Com-munity and the FRY/Belligerents,” The Scholars’ Initiative: Re-solving the Yugoslav Controversies, Report of Research Team

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5, West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University, p. 2, available from www.cla.purdue.edu/history/facstaff/Ingrao/si/Team5Report.pdf; State Department opposed to independence of Bangladesh: “Ban-gladesh War of Independence,” New World Encyclopedia, avail-able from www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Bangladesh_War_ of_Independence#USA_and_USSR; State Department opposed to independence of South Sudan and Eritrea, Andrew S. Natsios, Sudan, South Sudan, and Darfur: What Everyone Needs to Know, Ox-ford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2012, available from https://books.google.com/books?id=3oS-815ScpcC&pg=PT66&lpg=PT66&dq=State+Department+was+opposed+to+independence+of+south+sudan&source=bl&ots=c0Gym9tk0x&sig=mJ3Fsv-8LsoO8sEKRIlL7DRJ8i0&hl=en&sa=X&ei=fl6WVODhAsyrgwTLi4H4Aw&ved=0CGEQ6AEwCQ#v=onepage&q=State%20Department%20was%20opposed%20to%20independence%20of%20south%20sudan&f=false.

59. James W. Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters, New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010, p. 186.

60. Ahmed Rashid, Descent into Chaos: The U.S. and the Disas-ter in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia, New York: Penguin Books, 2008.

61. “U.S. Looks for Someone to Trust,” The Village Voice, Oc-tober 30, 2001.

62. “Karzai Admits to Being on Secret US Payroll,” Russia To-day (RT), April 29, 2013, available from rt.com/usa/afghanistan-cash-corruption-karzai-547/.

63. “Saddam Verdict Date ‘Rigged’ for Bush,” The New Zea-land Herald, November 5, 2006, available from www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=10409222.

64. “Hussein Trial Halts Again, Setting Off Wave of Criti-cism,” The Washington Post, January 25, 2006.

65. “Iraq: Amnesty International Deplores Death Sentences in Saddam Hussein Trial,” Amnesty International, November 5, 2006.

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66. “Karzai Family’s Wealth ‘Fuelling Insurgency,” The Inde-pendent August 7, 2009, available from www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/afghanistan/5991447/Karzai-familys-wealth-fuelling-insurgency.html.

67. “Iraq Crisis: Obama Makes It Clear—Caretaker Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki Should Go,” The Independent, August 11, 2014, available from www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/iraq-crisis-obama-makes-it-clear--caretaker-pm-nouri-almaliki-should-go-9662909.html.

68. Interview with Patti.

69. Ibid.

70. William Conrad Gibbons, The U.S. Government and the Vietnam War: Executive and Legislative Roles and Relationships, Part II: 1961-1964, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014, p. 161.

71. Bruce Nussbaum, “Marching America into a Quagmire,” Business Week, November 30, 1998.

72. Ibid.

73. Paul Kattenburg, The Vietnam Trauma in American Foreign Policy: 1945-75, Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers, January 1, 1980.

74. Frederick Nolting, From Trust to Tragedy: The Political Mem-oirs of Frederick Nolting, Kennedy’s Ambassador to Diem’s Vietnam, New York: Praeger, 1988.

75. Nussbaum.

76. Ibid.

77. On August 14, 2003, the Boston Globe reported that the CIA and the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) had both assessed before the invasion of Iraq that “Iraqi so-ciety and history showed little evidence to support the creation of democratic institutions” as a result of Iraq’s “history of repression and war; clan, tribal, and religious conflict.”

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In January 2003, the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College warned that “tensions among Iraqi religious, ethnic, and tribal communities” would make forming a post-inva-sion government difficult, warned of the dangers of “fragmenta-tion,” and expressly warned against disbanding the Iraqi army, described as “one of the few forces for unity within the country.”

In the January/February 2004 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, James Fallows reported the CIA was opposed to a process like the Bonn conference in Iraq because “rivalries in Iraq were so deep, and the political culture so shallow, that a similarly quick transfer of sovereignty would only invite chaos.” There were oth-er early prominent voices who warned against the war and its consequences.

In 2002, Scott Ritter, a Nuclear Weapons Inspector in Iraq from 1991-98, argued against an invasion and expressed doubts about the George W. Bush administration’s claims that Saddam Hussein had a weapons of mass destruction capability. Other leading public figures opposed the war, including Morton Hal-perin; Brent Scowcroft; former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Hugh Shelton; retired Marine General Anthony Zinni; Am-bassador Joseph Wilson (who exposed the faked yellowcake evi-dence); career diplomats like John Brady Kiesling, John Brown, and Mary Ann Wright; military leaders, including former Chair-man of the Joint Chiefs of Staff William Crowe, former Director of the National Security Agency Lieutenant General William Odom, former Commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East Joseph Hoar, former Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations H. Allen Holmes, former Ambassador to the United Nations Don-ald McHenry, and former Air Force Chief of Staff General Merrill McPeak. Other former government officials, including Jack Mat-lock, Jr., a member of the National Security Council under Ronald Reagan; former Ambassador to the Soviet Union John Reinhardt; former Director of the United States Information Agency Ronald I. Spiers; Under Secretary General of the United Nations for Po-litical Affairs and a former Director of the CIA Stansfield Turner; and former chief counterterrorism adviser on the National Se-curity Council for both the Bill Clinton and the George W. Bush administrations, Richard Clarke, argued that the invasion of Iraq would bolster the efforts of Islamic radicals who had long pre-dicted that the United States planned to invade an oil-rich Middle Eastern country.

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78. “Spare Afghanistan from U.S. ‘Nation-Building’,” To-ronto Sun, September 30, 2001, available from www.twf.org/News/Y2001/0930-SpareAfghan.html.

79. Author’s personal recollection.

80. Andre Weitzenhoffer, The Practice of Hypnotism, New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2000, pp. 400, 418-419.

81. Gareth Porter, “How LBJ Was Deceived on Gulf of Tonkin,” Consortium News, April 5, 2014, available from https://consortium-news.com/2014/08/05/how-lbj-was-deceived-on-gulf-of-tonkin/.

82. “The Iraq War—Part I: The U.S. Prepares for Conflict, 2001,” The National Security Archive, Washington, DC: The George Washington University, available from www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB326/.

83. “Vast Number of Military Bands May Not be Music to Gates’s Ears,” The Washington Post, August 24, 2010, available from www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08/23/AR2010082304711.html.

84. Frank Hoffman, “Dereliction of Duty Redux?” Washing-ton, DC: Foreign Policy Research Institute, November 2007, avail-able from www.fpri.org/articles/2007/11/dereliction-duty-redux.

85. Herbert McMaster, Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, The Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies that Led to Vietnam, New York: Harper Perennial, 1997.

86. Andrew J. Bacevich, Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country, New York: Metropolitan Books, 2013.

87. Hoffman.

88. Jonah Goldberg, “Obama’s Vision for a Spartan America,” National Review, January 27, 2012, available from www.national-review.com/articles/289402/obama-s-vision-spartan-america-jonah-goldberg; Charlie Lewis, “A New Sparta: America’s Threatening Civil-Military Gap,” Kennedy School Review, Vol. 11, 2011, p. 170.

210

89. George Herring, America’s Longest War, New York: Wiley, 1979, p. 358.

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APPENDIX I

CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY GUIDETO THE ANALYSIS OF INSURGENCY

Figure I-1. Title Page for the Central Intelligence Agency Guide to the

Analysis of Insurgency.

The following text is transcribed from the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) “Guide to the Analy-sis of Insurgency,” a handbook intended to provide government analysts with a way of interpreting the progression of events on the ground when making in-telligence assessments for the U.S. Government. The guide is unclassified and was released to the public many years ago. The CIA text is transcribed verbatim and is intersticed with observations (in italics) per-taining to the situation in Afghanistan in December 2014. Using these U.S. Government metrics and pub-licly available reportage, by any reasonable, objective assessment of the facts on the ground, the Taliban is in the “late stages of a successful insurgency.”

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Ability to protect supporters and local population:• Do government forces adequately protect local

supporters on a 24-hour basis? Afghanistan: No• Do national army “reaction forces” respond

quickly and effectively to reports of guerrilla attacks on local civilian militias or pro-govern-ment communities?

Afghanistan: Rarely, if ever.• Do government officials sleep in villages, or do

they seek protection of armed camps? Afghanistan: Government officials never sleep out-

side district centers, it would be suicidal. Insurgent forces always sleep among the local population.

• Are national army troops/guerrillas viewed locally as threatening outsiders or as helpful allies?

Afghanistan: 50 percent of the Afghan population say they view the police with “some” or “a great deal of fear.” The army is generally viewed positively. The Taliban overall has the support of approximately a third of the population, mostly in the south where the insurgency is most active.

Local military effectiveness:• Are local civilian militia aggressive in small

unit, day and night patrolling, or do they avoid contact with the enemy?

Afghanistan: Where they exist, local militias are de-fensive in nature. Patrolling is not done.

• Do government/guerilla forces have an effec-tive intelligence network at the local level?

Afghanistan: This is difficult to assess. The effec-tiveness of both enemy and government intelligence networks may be roughly equal.

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• How disciplined are government/insurgent forces in combat? Do they usually recover the weapons and bodies of fallen comrades before retiring?

Afghanistan: Insurgent forces are highly disci-plined. They rarely, if ever, leave weapons or casual-ties behind. Government police checkpoints are often wiped out to the last man. Government bodies are left behind, and are usually stripped of weapons and ammunition by the insurgents.

• Are local government/insurgent forces capable of executing coordinated attacks against nearby enemy strongpoints?

Afghanistan: Insurgent forces routinely execute co-ordinated attacks against government strongpoints. There were more than 6,000 attacks in the last year. Government forces rarely, if ever, operate offensive-ly and show little aggressive spirit.

Late-Stage Indicators of Successful Insurgencies.

Figure I-2. Late-Stage Indicators of Successful

Insurgencies.

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An analysis of historical cases indicates that a com-mon pattern of behavior and events characterizes the defeat of a government battling an insurgency. This pattern comprises four categories of developments:

• Progressive withdrawal of domestic support for the government.

• Progressive withdrawal of international sup-port for the government.

• Progressive loss of government over popula-tion and territory.

• Progressive loss of government coercive power.

These categories include a total of 14 interrelated and mutually reinforcing indicators of prospective in-surgent victory. Historically, the indicators have not appeared in any single order. Moreover, while no sin-gle indicator can be considered conclusive evidence of insurgent victory, all indicators need not be pres-ent for a government defeat to be in progress. While the indicators are designed to identify a progression of events typical of the final stages of a successful in-surgency, this progression is not inevitable. Effective government countermeasures can block the evolution of an insurgency and shift its momentum. Within the four categories, the indicators are:

Progressive withdrawal of domestic support for the government:

• Withdrawal of support by specific, critical seg-ments of the population:

Afghanistan: Much of the ethnic Pashtun segment of the population supports the insurgents. Very few of other ethnic group members do so.

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• Growing popular perception of regime illegiti-macy:

Afghanistan: The regime has never had any legiti-macy in the Weberian sense.

• Popular perception of insurgents as leading na-tionalists:

Afghanistan: Not applicable. The insurgents are viewed by their fellow ethnic group members as waging a legitimate jihad.

• Insurgent co-optation, incorporation, or elimi-nation of other major opposition groups to the insurgency:

Afghanistan: No. Some militias have changed sides and some police have defected, but there have been no major defections of other elements of the counterin-surgents.

Progressive withdrawal of international support for the government:

• Withdrawal of foreign support by specific, crit-ical allies.

Afghanistan: The withdrawal of more than 90 per-cent of foreign troops from Afghanistan can only be interpreted as such.

• Increasing international support for the insur-gents.

Afghanistan: No. Only Pakistan continues to sup-port the insurgents.

Progressive loss of government over population and territory:

• Significant expansion of territory under insur-gent control:

Afghanistan: Beyond any reasonable dispute.

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• Escalation of guerilla/terrorist violence: Afghanistan: Beyond any reasonable dispute. Gue-

rilla violence reached record levels in 2014.• Increasing inability of government to protect

supporters/officials from attack: Afghanistan: Beyond any reasonable dispute. Gov-

ernment casualties and attacks in the capital city reached record levels in 2014.

• National economy increasingly weakened by insurgent violence:

Afghanistan: Beyond any reasonable dispute. The Afghan economy has been shrinking every year since 2011.

Progressive loss of government coercive power:• Military plots or coups against the government: Afghanistan: No. The rumor of a coup was reported

by the New York Times in 2014.• Armed guerilla forces multiplying in size: Afghanistan: Beyond any reasonable dispute.• Lack of sufficient government troops for coun-

terinsurgency: Afghanistan: Beyond any reasonable dispute.• Government seriously negotiating sharing of

power with rebels: Afghanistan: The government would very much like

to negotiate a power-sharing arrangement with the jihadis. In January 2015, President Ghani offered three cabinet ministries to the Taliban.1 However, the Taliban are convinced of inevitable victory and are not interested in negotiations beyond the release of their prisoners.

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ENDNOTES - APPENDIX I

1. “Taliban ‘Reject Offer of Afghan Government Posts’,” BBC, January 9, 2015, available from www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-30737664.

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APPENDIX II

RELATIVE COMBAT POWER:WARGAMING BEYOND ONE-TO-ONE

Calculating military outcomes in Afghanistan is too often reduced to a simple 1:1 numerical ratio. For example, “there are 10,000 counterinsurgent troops and 2,500 insurgents,” wherein these are thought of as interchangeable units of equal strength. However, this kind of reductionist representation of the situa-tion is dangerous and highly misleading, because it completely omits any qualitative factors. No one would seriously suggest that 100 U.S. Army Rangers were the equal of 100 Afghan national policemen, for example. Yet, in most discussions of Afghan security, these forces would be routinely reduced to: “100” and “100.”

To address this, some innovative wargames of the 1970s developed a way to build in quantifiable fac-tors of mobility, range, power in attack, and tenacity in defense for different units. For example, the 101st Airborne at Bastogne would receive a high rating for defense. This would make it harder in the wargame to defeat that unit in an attack. Conversely, a 1945 Ger-man Volksturm unit comprised of boys and old men with outdated weapons might receive a defensive fac-tor of zero, because the wartime experience of such last ditch units was that they did not put up much of a fight and had no tactical power. A World War II wargame in which a battalion of 101st Airborne sol-diers was the same as a Volksturm battalion was unre-alistic, and this innovation made it more realistic. To give another example, a Waffen SS division would be given a high attack rating because they were generally

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populated with fanatical, highly motivated, tactically skilled, well-trained, obedient and well-equipped fighters.

Figure II-1. Examples of Wargame Counters andan Explanation of the Factors.

The same principle could be applied to Afghani-stan today. A Navy SEAL team and a squad of Afghan National Police (ANP) might be the same number of men, but they should not be evaluated militarily on a 1:1 numerical equivalent basis in analyzing outcomes in Afghanistan. It would also be unrealistic, and it would not reflect battlefield realities. In the same way, in a broader sense, referring to the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) as a single unified number of men in uniform is equally misleading. The Afghan

Examples of wargame counters, top, and an ex-planation of the factors represented as numbers in each of the four corners, bottom. The factors rate the unit shown in terms of its power in attack, power in defense, mobility, and the range of its weapons.

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National Army (ANA) is stronger militarily than the ANP, and agglomerating them as “128,500 ANSF” rather than “75,000 ANA and 53,500 ANP” is highly misleading—just as agglomerating, for example, one Waffen SS Panzer Division (20,000 men and 500 Tiger tanks) and three Volksturm divisions (30,000 old men and boys with civilian weapons) as simply “50,000 men” would be misleading in a wargame.

In an effort to illustrate and reinforce this point graphically in a format that will make the most sense to a military readership, the author used unclassified data from open sources to evaluate the ANA, ANP, ALP, ANA Commandos, an ANA Company rein-forced by a U.S. Special Forces A Team, and a 100-man Taliban battle group in the same format introduced by the 1970s wargames, rating their mobility, range of firepower, and tenacity in offense and defense (i.e., combat power). Figure II-2 shows, purely for pur-poses of illustration, how the relative combat power and tactical factors might compare. Thus, the Taliban company counter could easily attack and overcome an ANP platoon counter, as they regularly do in real life, but could not successfully attack an ANA company reinforced by a U.S. Special Forces A Team, because its associated close air support is overwhelming in the defense rating—as is true in real life.

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Figure II-2. Notional Game Counters.

The purpose of this Appendix is to attempt to add nuance to the analysis of the current security situation in Afghanistan by introducing qualitative thinking into a discussion that today is dominated by quantita-tive thinking.

Notional game counters for the ANA, ANP, ALP, Taliban, ANA Commando, and an ANA company reinforced by a U.S. Special Forces A Team, to illus-trate the differences in military tactical strength and combat value of the units. The asterisk indicates that U.S. forces no longer engage in offensive operations.

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The Strategic Lessons Unlearned from Vietnam,

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U.S. Army in Afghanistan

The Strategic Lessons Unlearned from Vietnam,

Iraq, and Afghanistan:

Why the Afghan National Security Forces Will Not Hold, and the Implications for the

U.S. Army in Afghanistan

M. Chris MasonM. Chris Mason

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asonThe Strategic Lessons Unlearned from

Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan:

Why the Afghan National Security Forces W

ill Not Hold, and the Implications

for the U.S. Army in Afghanistan

The Strategic Lessons Unlearned from Vietnam

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y in Afghanistan